SPAT_07_LN

“Speaking to an interlocutor who would clearly incline to such patterns of privilege, Foucault puts the case firmly yet tactfully:

Every power relationship implies, at least // in potential // [and this is a “more rational” name on the chain of power-names – // puissance // in French], a strategy of struggle, in which two forces [a “less rational” name on the same chain] are not superimposed. . . . a relationship of confrontation reaches its term, its final moment … when stable mechanisms replace the free play of antagonistic reactions.

Force is the name of the subindividual preontic substance traced with irreducible struggle-structures in the general sense that enables //and// limits confrontation. //Reading// (rather than merely quoting) Foucault, one notices the importance of the parentheses around “(and the victory of one of the two adversaries),” that fits into the ellipsis in the passage I have cited about. To trivialize this into mere functionalism would, //mutatis mutandis,// put the entire materialist tradition out of court, a consummation which Rorty //et al.// would not find implausible” (Spivak 32)

WORD-PLAY:



“I cannot find anywhere in Foucault the thought of a founding violence. To quote Marx where one shouldn’t, Foucault always remains within the realm of necessity (even in the clinamen to his last phase) whereas Derrida makes for the realm of freedom only to fall on his face. I would not choose between the two” (Spivak 33)

[]

ISSUES OF POLARITY WITHIN WOMEN’S RIGHTS:

“And changes in //pouvoir/savoir// can make visible the repressive elements in both situations, even through “disciplinary” means (through the Women’s Studies component of the Culture Studies collective for example) of woman’s freedom on the one hand, or of woman’s right to a special role in the propagation of society on the other. One must not stop here, of course. The homely tactics of everyday //pouvoir/savoir//, the stuff of women’s lives, leads, not only to the governmentality of dress codes and work habits, guilt feelings and guilt trips, but also to the delineation of the great aggregative apparatuses of power/knowledge which deploy the family as a repressive issue, day care as an alibi, and reproductive rights as a moral melodrama in national elections and policy” (35).

Savoir = Knowledge Pouvoir = Power

Reasons there is no ‘Archaeology of Power’ (knowledge connected to discourse and language, “irreducible connections to language” so it’s archaeology can be written)

“The differential substance of power is force, which does not have an irreducible connection to language. It is not even necessarily structured like a language, just as a magnetic field (which is symbolizable) is not necessarily structured like a language. Writing its archaeology would entail a first step: writing //pouvoir// in terms of //savoir//. Foucault himself sometimes put this entailment somewhat more polemically, especially in his later interviews – as a turning away from mere language” (36)

“There can be no doubt at all that the //enonce// as “the atom of discourse” is a catachresis. I believe this word has broken under the burden of paleonymy. This is what one camp of Foucault criticism would call the //failure// of archaeology” (37) As “the atom of discourse” does //enonce// have to deal with moments of ‘Clinamen’ – originally intended as an explanation of a bending, movement among atomistic entities?

Also: [] Catachresis: “ …the name of many different types of figure of speech in which a word or phrase vastly has departed from traditional usage” (thank you to the masses behind Wikipedia)

“[|Postcolonial] theorist [|Gayatri Spivak] applies this word to 'master words' that claim to represent a group—e.g., women or the [|proletariat]—when there are no 'true' examples of 'woman' or 'proletarian'. In a similar way, words that are imposed upon a people and are deemed improper thus denote a catachresis, a word with an arbitrary connection to its meaning.” (Wikipedia, accessed at 4:01 pm 10/23/13)

What does it mean to quote Wikipedia, to which so many people have contributed – how ‘true’ or reliable can it be? What is Wikipedia in terms of Catachresis…

“The word “definition” itself becomes a catachresis here, for, by Foucault’s own rhetoric, it may not be a definition that has been or can be used”

The powdered coffee creamer stares onward, the slow regulated drip of the faucet moves onward in time, toward a shortening, a lessening of the time I really have to get things done, to sit back and contemplate, to let such meanings absorb…shize

“//Pouvoir/savoir,// then, is catachrestic in the way that all names of processes not anchored in the intending subject must be: lines of knowing constituting ways of doing and not doing, the lines themselves irregular clinamens from subindividual atomic systems – fields of force, archives of utterance. Inducing them is that moving field of shredded //enonces// or differential forces that cannot be constructed as objects of investigation” (37)

Colin comes in intermittently to share knowledge, idle chat and chai tea. A nice reprieve from Spivak, a clearing up of thought before delving back in. We discuss moving, the split of Social Studies of Science and History/Philosophy of Science, traveling to conferences, Breyerman’s class offered for the summer, Linnda’s sabbatical, William S. Borroughs’ art, and this land’s me upon Seana and her master’s thesis.

[Picture of chair here. Talk about the reflection dancing on the surface, not of the surface, but above and beyond. Illuminated and different – a difference? Maybe not….how to rethink all of this. How to explain]

“Put another way, he is himself at once using the inaccessibility of madness (as “truth of Being”) as a catachresis for the //ontic// – perhaps through his on-the-job training with Heideggerian existential analysis – and is sufficiently dazzled by the paleonymic promise to make an onto//logical// commitment to madness, to want to speak it in critical speech” (38)

** “production of “truth”” (39).

Regarding the failure to fully push against or say one is not essentialist or universalist:  “Even as we talk about //feminist// practice, or privileging practice over theory, we are universalizing – not only generalizing but universalizing. Since the moment of essentializing, universalizing, saying yes to the onto-phenomenological question, is irreducible, let us at least situate it at the moment, let us become vigilant about our own practice and use it as much as we can rather than make the totally counter-productive gesture of repudiating it” (Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic 11)