Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 20:22:37 -0400
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] Re: Chomsky on Foucault, Agamben and Negri 
From: Tom Blancato <tblan-AT-telerama.com>


On Tue, 2 Sep 2003 05:31:19 -0700 (PDT), <rodrigoguim-AT-riseup.net> wrote:

> One thing is clear: all our efforts at giving Foucault a "place" in this
> thing called Knowledge have failed us.  Foucault is not working within 
> the
> dominant paradigms that use the dualisms traditional to metaphysical
> culture.

Somehow or other it must be noted and understood that Foucault, perhaps in 
a kind of partial form, opens up the metapardigmatic, something that 
discourses tend not to want to begin to handle. How does he open these up? 
I suggest, in a proto-metaparadigmatic mode. Irony is a cheif aspect of the 
proto-metaparadigmatic. I have the feeling that if I were to lay out how 
that may be the case here (on this list), it would not be broached or 
treated fairly. I toss this in as provocation and even accusation. In any 
case, we find in Foucaulot a "white hot" critique that draws the Same with 
nothing but its own jagged edges. Foucault, after all, wrote of "episteme" 
and drew this into question. Perhaps what is most important was not that 
Man be washed from the same in the ocean's steady licks, but that it be 
philosophically grapsed that "episteme" was written, must be written, in 
the sand. Any such writing, of the very idea of "episteme", the notion of a 
vast and diverse singularity that is at once a configuration of knowledge 
and at the same time a flight, a crime, an act of intellectual conscience 
that pays attention to the Man behind the curtain, is always necessarily 
written in sand. Sand, in the end, will have been the answer to a concrete 
that lies before reflection and irony. Yet it is for we who watch the sand 
fall between our fingers to begin to grasp what the metaparadigmatic means. 
In this sense, "post" (meta) "anarchism" (a paradigm), as much as it 
dutifully layers cinderblock and troweled cement within a certain literary 
genre, finds itself (if it finds itself) in the metaparadigmatic. 
Thoughtaction or any adequate response to "Foucault" (for those who have 
some idea of what "Foucault" can mean here), begins when it is not only 
sand that falls through the fingers, but salt.


>
> Postanarchism, if it is to move beyond the tyranny of universality, of 
> the
> arrogance of dominant forms of knowledge, needs to rethink anarchism's
> links to the dualisms of metaphysics.

Try it here and you may very well be "gracefully" shoved aside...

> Foucault tries, with much success,
> to show that there is thought beyond the essentialism-nonessentialism
> debate.  There are no universal foundations for action, and that of 
> course
> means that an anti-essentialis cannot serve as a foundation either.  What
> matters for Foucault are the effects of actions, or of texts, and not
> their proper configuration.  In this light, postanarchism would look
> different whenever it responds to different contexts.
>
> Rodrigo
>

Really, though, perhaps this Foucauldian insight can be questioned. I hold 
that his opening of the mis en scene of institution, of episteme, does lay 
open the problem(atic) of "configuration" and a certain responsibility of 
the how and way this laying out. IT is not at all that what matters is 
merely or only the "effects". In this regard, with or without Foucalt, it 
is the overall, the epistema, the mis en scene, etc., that gives the 
"effect" its meaning, its constitution. And there is no way to give a nod 
to Foucault without grasping the magnitude of the freezing of the mis en 
scene that is any prison. There is no way, if there is to be conscience in 
these matters, to give a nod to Foucault's "prison work" without assessing 
how it is with prisons in France or elsewhere. There is no way, in short, 
to accept an activism that does not imply at the same time a radicalization 
of thought that is concerned precisely with the constitution of action and 
effects as functions of the metaparadigmatic. Generally speaking, to be as 
clear as possible, this range is variously closed off and shut down, both 
in theory and in activisms, such as they may be. Foucault walked backwards. 
It is for us to turn around.

Tom Blancato

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