Between Being and Multiplicity, there is the Womb of Creation 

Over the past week, starting on Monday, the 24th of April, and resuming on Wednesday, the 26th, I have been covering the essentials of Foucault’s work on aesthetics. What I've come to see is that his aesthetic work was significantly influenced by his methodological and epistemological approaches.

Starting with Philosophy and Psychology, as I read this work by Foucault, I was left with the impression that he did not feel as if the psychologists understood the work they were undertaking. Regardless, Foucault recognized that the West had become entangled with psychology (p. 250). In addition, the field of psychology also entangled philosophy, as an anthropological field, along with the other human sciences. Foucault attributes the development of psychology to Freud’s work on the unconscious and its proceeding advances in the semiotic and hermeneutic fields (pp. 252-253). What Foucault sees in psychology, however, specifically as it relates to its understanding of the unconscious, is how the unconscious is a force developed beneath Man’s awareness. From psychology’s work on the unconscious emerges the focus on semiotics and semantics, and more importantly, how physiology and environment affect one’s unconscious behavior. Foucault seems to be arguing that even if psychology is studying the behavior of mice, it is ultimately studying how Man relates to his environment, his fellow man, and himself. This is a common theme in Foucault’s analysis of the sciences: he’s particularly interested in how fields and domains of knowledge interact with their subjects as objects, resulting in changes in those fields and domains and the individuals affected by them.

In the Order of Things, Foucault discusses his archeological studies, to be sure, but what this piece is primarily concerned with is addressing the problems Nietzsche posed for the fields of philosophy and history; specifically, the problem of Man and his signs. By Archeology, what Foucault means is the study of the implied knowledge (savoir) of a society (p. 261). Here we can see the influence of Freud’s unconscious within Foucault’s work. The archeological practice requires a vast amount of reading, from a given period, on a specific area of interest, as well (p. 263). Foucault’s work apparently led him to the conclusion that Man didn’t exist conceptually (savoir) in the classical period and through the 17th Century. Instead, he existed through discursive modes. At the end of the 17th Century, with the dissolution of the discursive mode’s role within the West, Man had to conceptualize himself as a category of knowledge, and develop a domain of human knowledge (savoir) (p. 264). Foucault, citing Nietzsche, sees the conceptualization of Man as a category of knowledge as a fatal outcome for Man and the West. Where there’s a sign, Man cannot be, and where one makes signs speak, there must Man fall silent (p. 266). In other words, the symbol for Man does all the thinking for Man, and thus, stops Man from thinking.

I see this problem recurring throughout Foucault’s work: The sign can be mistaken for the thing that it is signifying. However, this doesn’t reveal nearly the whole process. Man doesn’t simply shape his signs from a purely internal place. Because Man needs to grasp and understand the world around him, he produces a set of signs that enable him to achieve his goals. For him to do this effectively, these signs must correspond to the thing they are signifying – they are not arbitrary. Still, Foucault addresses this, I think. His emphasis on discursive practices allows Man to develop signs that can evolve over time rather than being limited by their internal logic. However, this makes the problem seem too simple for me. Can Man, generally speaking, engage in the discursive practices that allow him to develop his signs? He must – sure – but what if he can’t? As de Jouvenel made clear, a society of enlightened individuals sounds nice until you start interacting with actual people.

In Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, Foucault explores the impact of these 19th Century thinkers on his work. What I mainly took away from this work is how interpretive modes produce different effects. What I think Foucault was trying to express was that the interpretive modes of the late, 19th Century, to put the matter rather bluntly, inflate the ego. Foucault begins this discussion with language. Language, as he sees it, has always produced two suspicions. Firstly, language does not mean what it says (e.g., allēgora and huponoia) (p. 269). The first of these two terms, I think, can best be translated as figurative or imaginative speech. The latter, suspicious speech, is below what can be known; in Latin, the term literally implies that you need to look upward to know because you are below what is known. Secondly, language is not merely verbal “there are other things in the world [that] speak and are not language” (p. 270). Hence, where does language begin and end; couldn’t everything be seen as a system of languages? Regardless, what Foucault notes is that Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, as late, 19th Century thinkers and interpreters of language, significantly changed how we see Language (p. 272). Foucault points to the discursive methods of Freud and Marx to show how they have created a hall of mirrors for the contemporary world that gives the impression of depth but is just a symptom of what, I think could accurately be described as, grandiose narcissism or narcissism (pp. 272-274). The other problem posed by these three seminal figures: they have introduced methods that cause one to endlessly interpret and reinterpret phenomena, resulting in something like madness, which is most evident, I think, in the work of Nietzsche (pp. 274-275).

These interpretive methods are fixed by a rather simple principle: the interpretive mode precedes the interpretable. What does this say about the act of interpreting? It cloaks another intent that is given shape once we recognize the cause interpretation must have within itself (pp. 275-277). I.e., as I have come to understand it, self-development. This leads to the next question: who will interpret the signs? If it is the semiologist, there is observed an absolute existence of signs, which signifies a Marxist approach proceeding Marx, which “enthrones the terror of the index on to suspect language.” In other words, the semiological approach requires constant reference to a semiological authority. Through this approach, Man subjugates himself to the sign and the authorities who have constructed it. Secondly, there is the circular hermeticist, who enters the domain of language, falling somewhere between madness and pure language, leading to a Nietzschean approach (p. 278). This is Foucault’s approach and I think the sounder of the two. The former produces the problem Nietzsche was worried about as it concerns signs: i.e., an unthinking and subjugated Man. Yet, madness cannot do – can it? The best approach, I would assume, is something like a middle ground, which Foucault’s methodological and epistemological archeological and, thus, genealogical approaches seem to be searching for.

Foucault’s discussion of Nietzsche continues through the interview On the Ways of Writing History. While this interview does discuss the archeological method Foucault developed, it’s more than that. Roughly speaking, he seems to be implying he can construct general statements out of the vast bodies of texts he uses for his research on a particular subject. These statements serve as points to demarcate one period of scientific thought from another. While the output of Foucault’s archeological method can be falsified (p. 284), he also tacitly recognizes that it suffers from the same issue of interpretive circularity that was endemic to the genealogical analyses conducted by Nietzsche (pp. 294-295). Where the interview ends, that is where it truly begins. In other words, Foucault seems to have embraced the endemically circular issue found in Nietzsche’s work rather than resisting it.

In On the Archeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle, Foucault’s epistemological methodology is fully fleshed out formally. The question posed to him by the circle: What relations are maintained between the horizontality (of a scientific field) and the verticality (of a scientific field); i.e., how does the scientific process relate to science’s development? This question required an extensive response, which I think requires as little interpretation from me as possible.

For Foucault, history is like a function, and as a function, it has limits. At these indefinable limits, there are discontinuities, i.e., breaks. These breaks establish new scientific modes, i.e., existential or ethical modes. The historian’s new job, I think Foucault is saying in this piece, is to study these temporal discontinuities; i.e., the move from one existential or ethical mode to another.

Foucault gives several examples to show the necessity of this new, discursive historical approach, i.e., his archeological approach. The unity of a singular object, for example, such as a book, cannot be described except from outside itself. All its pages, words, the way it was put together, its author, publisher, whether it is part of a series, etc., nothing can be known about it through it, alone; it must be understood from outside itself, within a discursive field (p. 304). Secondly, an author’s or creator’s corpus of work: his oeuvre. The oeuvre highlights the importance of a field of knowledge existing outside itself that defines the corpus of works by an author, which cannot be known without the external discursive mode (p. 305). Picking only an author’s work gives an archeologist of Foucault’s variety no new information about a particular author, themes within his work, or where his work stands relative to his contemporaries. Hence Foucault’s emphasis on studying so many books.

The discursive mode that Foucault is describing asks the following questions: How is it that a statement or event appeared rather than some other one in its place (p. 367)? The “How” I have placed here serves as an adverb and a noun and points to the existential and ethical mode that is at the core of Foucault’s ethical model. I.e., what mode constituted, lead to, this statement, i.e., this event? “What is this regular existence that comes to the fore in what is said – and nowhere else [emphasis added]?” (p. 367). These questions generate an ensemble that serves as a kind of unconscious emanation of the work(s) used to generate the discovery (p. 309). Foucault also describes the product of this discursive mode as an individuality; i.e., a product of individualization. Foucault says, “The characteristic relation that permits the individualization of a general unity of statements concerning madness would therefore be the rule of the simultaneous or successive appearance of the various objects that are named, described, analyzed valued, or judged in it; the law of their exclusion or mutual implication; the system that governs their transformation.” I.e., Individualization is the formulation of the objects of interest, their distances, how they’re separated, etc., “law[s] of distribution” (p. 313).

Once the oeuvre has been individualized, Foucault then proceeds to focus on the enunciation. The enunciation of an individualized field or work is the product of “[the] dispersed and heterogeneous statements… that govern[ ] [its] distribution” (p. 315). I.e., the rules that govern how the field’s elements are set forth. Once the enunciation is established, the field can be subjected to examination via four categorical elements endemic to the work. First, there is the attribution. The attribution is “the [conceptual] group that governs the formation of those concepts which permit the description and analysis of the sentence as a unity in which the elements (the words) are not merely juxtaposed but related to each other.” I.e., you must understand how the grammatical rules of work interrelate. Secondly, there’s the articulation. The articulation, “is the [conceptual] group that governs the formation of those concepts which permit a description of the relations between the different signifying elements of the sentence and the different elements of what is represented by these signs.” I.e., you must understand what is meant by what is stated in the work’s body, where the word comes from, and what could be meant by the word as it relates to the attribution of the work’s body. Next, there’s the designation. The designation “governs the emergence not only of such concepts as that of the arbitrary and conventional sign but also that of the spontaneous and natural sign, immediately charged with expressive value (thus permitting the reintroduction of the action of language in the real or ideal becoming of humanity).” In other words, what the words and grammar mean once they are put together, i.e., what is generally meant by the complete combination of the articulation and attribution. Lastly, there’s the derivation. The derivation “accounts for the formation of a very dispersed and heterogeneous series of notions; the idea of an immobility of language which is only subject to change as a result of external accidents; the idea of a historical correlation between the development of language and the individual’s capacities for analysis, reflection, and understanding [connaissance]; the idea of a circular determination between the forms of language, those of writing, knowledge and science, and those of social organization, and, finally, those of historical progress; the idea of poetry understood not only a particular use of vocabulary and grammar but as the spontaneous movement of language shifting in the space of human imagination, which is, but its very nature, metaphorical.” This is simply a long-winded way of saying the cultural developments produced by error or reinterpretation of the work, through another lens, which also affect the work or how one perceives it (p. 317).

Lastly, a field must be understood with respect to the cultural and political milieu it was produced within. Foucault calls this the field of strategic possibilities (p. 320). Because opinions can confound a field, the scientific archeologist must individualize a set of statements from mere opinions. To achieve this, he must examine the field of strategic possibilities, i.e., he “must be able to register the distribution of points of choice.” I.e., the archeologist must understand why one choice was preferred over another.

“These four criteria are not only not incompatible, they demand one another; the first defines the unity of a discourse by the rule of formation of all its objects; the next by the rule of formation of all its syntactic types; the third by the rule of formation of all its semantic elements; the fourth by the rule of formation of all its operational eventualities. All the aspects of discourse are thus covered. And when it is possible, in a group of statements, to register and describe one referential, one type of enunciative divergence, one theoretical network, one field of strategic possibilities, then one can be sure that they belong to what can be called a discursive formation. This formation groups together a whole population of statement-events” (pp. 320-321).

As I see it, the discursive, archeological methodology is a profound work. This methodology allowed Foucault to investigate scientific fields and generate discursive formations. Out of this epistemological methodology, Foucault identifies two varieties of science. The first, roughly speaking, can be described as dead sciences that have been proven false, and, the second, living sciences, whose modes still permit them to generate knowledge that is not invalid according to their domain’s internal rules. “To analyze discursive formations, positivities, and the knowledge which corresponds to them is not to assign forms of scientificity, but, rather, to run through a field of historical determination which must account for the appearance, retention, transformation, and, in the last analysis, the erasure of discourses, some of which are still recognized today as scientific, some of which have lost that status, some have never pretended to acquire it, and finally, others have never attempted to acquire it. In a word, knowledge is not science in the successive displacement of its internal structures; it is the field of its actual history” (p. 326).

What Foucault captures here is the morphology of a domain, and its field(s) as they relate to each and generate new information. I.e., he takes an overhead approach to the investigation of knowledge. However, there is something important to recognize about this process. Specifically, his discursive and archeological mode appears to be limited to explaining the objects of its discourse rather than ever understanding them as lived experiences. Essentially, this archeological method allows Foucault to tell you all about what you do for a living but he can never understand what you do for a living. He knows everything about color, sitting in his black-and-white room, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to experience color. He knows everything about bees but he doesn’t know what it’s like to be a bee. He understands the physics of archery, but he doesn’t know how to shoot a bow. However, I think this is Foucault being humble. Surely knowing about the physics of archery, bees, or color must convey some understanding of color, bees, or archery. At the very least, it would be easier to imagine yourself as a bee, a person who sees color, or who fires a bow even if you do not understand what it’s literally like to fire a bow, see color, or be a bee.

Regardless, the fruits of Foucault’s archeological discourses can be seen in his work Madness and Society. This piece by Foucault is a discussion of his archeological discourses vis-à-vis his study on madmen. He lucidly shows that madmen have evolved through the centuries or, at least, our conception of them has evolved. However, this is not necessarily due to any new knowledge about them. Rather, Foucault clearly states that it was the West’s social conditions that led to the mass imprisonment and subjugation of, very roughly speaking, madmen. Under previous epochs, the madman was a much larger part of the community than he currently is. Since very little has changed conceptually about the madman, his treatment cannot be attributed to any deep insight of his nature. Rather, our treatment of the madman is, according to Foucault, a response to an industrialized society’s needs. Foucault even goes so far as to regard primitive peoples as more progressive and humane as it concerns the treatment and inclusion of their madmen.

In Theatrum Philosophicum, a review of Deleuze’s work, Foucault suggests that Deleuze’s work plays on the temporal circularity Foucault, himself, has embraced as a descendent of Nietzsche. Metaphysics, as it is traditionally understood, appears to be significantly critiqued by Foucault. Metaphysics seems to be a critique of one set of simulacra for another. He specifically states that the traditional metaphysical approach is discarding its previous mode and, instead, embracing a new one: “phantasmaphysics” (pp. 346-348).

Foucault seems particularly interested in the idea of a metaphysical event as well. He summarizes these events as follows: “At the limit of dense bodies, an event is incorporeal (a metaphysical surface); on the surface of words and things, an incorporeal event is the meaning of a proposition (its logical dimension); in the thread of discourse, an incorporeal meaning-event is fastened to the verb (the infinitive point of the present)” (p. 350). Foucault sees philosophy as struggling with metaphysics (p. 351). “First, on the pretext that nothing can be said about those things which lie ‘outside’ the world, [it] rejects the pure surface of the event and attempts to enclose it forcibly – as a referent – in the spherical plentitude of the world. The second, on the pretext that signification only exists for consciousness, places the event outside and beforehand, or inside and after, and always situates it with respect to the circle of the self. The third, on the pretext that events can only exist in time, [it] defines its identity and submits it to a solidly centered order.” Despite all of this, Foucault sees Deleuze as having produced a “metaphysics of the incorporeal event (which is consequently irreducible to a physics of the world), a logic of neutral meaning (rather than a phenomenology of signification based on the subject), and a thought of the present infinitive (and not the raising up of the conceptual future in a past essence)” (p. 352). In other words, Foucault references Deleuze’s work believing that it has overcome the problems philosophy has had with metaphysics. How has it done this?

The problem Foucault seems to be identifying within metaphysics is how the subject relates to its object when its object is so vast and indefinable. He seems to see the connection of these events as a thought and the phantasm of metaphysics as thoughts on those thoughts; i.e., metaphysics appears to be a system of thinking about thinking (pp. 353-354).  Foucault sees Deleuze overcoming the problem of how one interacts with the many by conceptualizing being as difference; as two substances with categorical distinctions: he sees being as a unity of multiplicity. What this helps to alleviate for Foucault is the monotony of existence. Foucault sees stupid people as people who cannot recognize the categorical distinctions in reality. This is like a place of non-categories; a grey area where there are no shades but one. The philosopher engages with this place by trying to draw out the distinction through thought. Still, this is a monotonous act in itself. Only when the problem, when being and non-being come into contact, does thinking no longer remain monotonous. At that moment, thinking becomes worthwhile (pp. 360-364). Foucault uses the analogy of drugs, e.g., LSD and opium, to highlight how this monotony can be broken up or what it’s like to experience the world as the philosopher when he encounters the problem of being and non-being coming into contact, but this induced experience is fleeting. A mode of being, such as the one Deleuze allegedly offers, resolves this fleeting sensation.

Foucault focuses on the circular event to draw our attention toward the unity of multiplicity. He highlights three deaths of becoming (p. 366). Firstly, “the devouring father-mother in labor”; second, “the circle, by which the gift of life passes each springtime”; and lastly, the “repetitive fibrillation of the present, the eternal, and dangerous fissure fully given an instant, affirmed in a single stroke once and for all.” What Foucault is addressing is the problem of temporal linearity and circularity, which one is to give out? The conclusion, which I think is accurate, is that of temporal linearity. His conclusion can be summarized in this statement, which I have extracted from the English translation of his essential works: The present is filled with potential, and out of this potential comes being, this single being comes into contact with multiplicity, generating greater multiplicity through his interactions with it, which collapses back into the single being… To me, this summarizes the idea of recurrence Foucault is trying to communicate. Recurrence becomes the mode by which the philosopher is given new life, in the present, as an essence of becoming rather than a becoming thing or an essential thing. As it was in his ethical approach, the present plays a significant role in his understanding of philosophy, time, and history.

This play on becoming and being is played out in his exploration of Nietzsche’s work: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. What Foucault wants to express is that the origin of an idea is rooted in a chance occurrence (p. 377). He reaches that idea via the following causal chain, which can be produced through an analysis of both Theatrum Philosophicum and Nietzsche, Genealogy, History: Multiplicity --> Chance --> Being │ Multiplicity --> Chance --> …

As a being interacts with the multiplicity within a specific environment, he can constitute and shape his body; this, Foucault, regards as the Herkumft of a man (pp. 373-376). In their specific environment, these people will develop norms and rules that justify their existence within that specific place and time. Foucault has interpreted the genealogy of morals to be a study of the rules that justify these rules of chance between one group of people and another (pp. 376-379). Like other political scientists of the mid-20th Century, he sees law, norms, or customs as a way for Power to effectuate its rule, command its people, and justify its actions.

With this in mind, Foucault then juxtaposes traditional historical analysis against effective, genealogical, or Nietzschean historical analysis (pp. 379-382). What he shows is that the effective method lets its conclusions come from the intermingling of events its process covers. The genealogist is like a physician studying a period to discern why it unraveled as it did; i.e., to diagnose its problems without presupposing the kind of problem it has. He also acknowledges the interplay between being and chance; specifically, how the two interact. Foucault also seems to juxtapose the two historical methods political (pp. 382-385). The traditional historical method justifies itself on behalf of the people, the plebs. The traditional historical approach purports to know the truth so that it can liberate the people from their evil oppressors; which, since they are good, must conform to their desires (i.e., history’s top-down approach). The effective, genealogical, or Nietzschean historical method appears to be a descendant of Machiavellian’s analytical technique. Like the Machiavellians, the Nietzscheans show Man to himself as he eternally is – a petty, evil, and unlucky creature (p. 383). To do otherwise is to reconfigure the reality he's faced with. As much as a Platonic model of the Political body might try, it cannot deny the political reality of Man; its Platonic world of forms, of categories, limited by their subjective understanding, cannot deny the capricious and cruel existence of Man.

Genealogy, as Foucault sees it, flips the traditional mode on its head. It parodies history to mock it and bring to the fore the real game being played beneath the political masquerade (p. 386). It does this to ask a very specific question: What systems inhibit the formation of an identity? (pp. 386-387). An environment, its components, and their systems enable Man, by interacting with them (Being │ Multiplicity) to construct an identity. If something is preventing this from happening, it must be due to that environment's components or its systems. As I noted, while it is true that not all men can develop this personal identity, most men, if they are not limited by some external force, probably can, by interacting with their environment, thus, develop an identity. I do not see a problem with this idea generally. Concerning the problematic of identity formation, Foucault argues truth has become a tool for the historian to justify some Power. Knowledge (connaissance) limits Man’s self-creation (i.e., self-development) – which I have discussed in my review of Foucault’s ethical work. The genealogist is, thus, tasked with sacrificing these truths, which only affirm our desires, for a way of knowing that permits self-development (pp. 387-388). I.e., the truth the Nietzschean sacrifices, the truth Foucault is willing to sacrifice, is not some eternal truth or the Law, rather, it is those truths which take the place of legitimate truth and which only serve to justify Power’s authority as a tyrannical figure. The problem: in the search for truth (savoir), Man destroys himself by coming into conflict with those systems whose claim to truth is a simulacrum that justifies Power’s authority. I.e., in actually embodying a will to truth, in genuinely searching for the truth, Man sets himself against those potentates, institutions, and orders that demand his annihilation because he demonstrates that they are only playing a power game.

In My Body, This Paper, This Fire, Foucault investigates Derrida’s interpretation of Descartes's statements on dreams and madness. He particularly has a problem with Derrida's suggestion that Descartes has slipped an empirical perspective into his work. What he discovers, I think, is quite interesting. He begins by asking the following: Is madness more intermittent than dreams? (p. 395). He concludes by saying that madness is less frequent than dreams, in a demonstrative and accessible example that can lead to an exercise. It is this exercise that occupies the main body of the work. Foucault argues that Descartes saw dreaming as an exercise, i.e., meditating on dreaming leads one to feel as if one cannot differentiate the real from the dream. Yet, even in this “stupor,” man can engage in reason (p. 398). The dreamer doesn’t actually notice the difference between dreaming and madness (pp. 400-401). The dreamer is madder, or we might first assume he is, than the madman. However, madmen doubt themselves! I.e., disqualify themselves and, thus, it is better to go on dreaming and accept, axiomatically that one is in a dream. Hence, it is seemingly saner to live as if you are dreaming (pp. 402-403). However, this doesn’t resolve our problem.

The meditations serve as discursive exercises on deduction (p. 406). Doubt of one’s actuality is self-defeating, i.e., self-disqualifying. One must accept oneself as one is composed in space and time if one is to make sense (p. 409). If you’ve been following this analysis, this may cause you to pause and think: then, aren’t those who engage in the masquerade, those masked liars, playing the game for their self-aggrandizement, possessed by their desires, aren’t they saner than the man who has the audacity to question the masquerade? Not quite. The exercise shows the masquerade for what it is: a dream of desire and will to power.

The meditating subject knows he’s not a madman but he's also unsure about whether he is awake or in a dream. The masked players see themselves as awake, they have no doubts about the game they’re playing or do not openly question the game. I.e., while they do not doubt themselves, they also do not doubt the game they’re playing is real, i.e., it isn’t just a masquerade of desire or a power fantasy (p. 417). However, this is an aside, though a poignant one, to the point Foucault was making.

What Foucault is trying to communicate through this piece is that the discursive practice must be carried out from the field it represents; i.e., even if the discursive actor is not part of the field, it has to engage with it on its terms. The text must be inhabited, its grammar, and meaning (preferably original) understood – the author must speak for himself. As was made clear in Foucault’s aesthetic work in What is an Author, the author, the work, and the field must be a delimiting force for the discursive archeologist. Foucault does not see Derrida as having engaged in this kind of discursive work, and thus, Foucault accuses Derrida of reaching the wrong conclusion. The distinction Foucault establishes is one between wisdom and blatant deception or illusory work; the work of semiotic necromancers. If the discursive archeologist cannot do this perfectly, he must admit to his reservations or doubts, and this will distinguish him from the madman.

Lastly, in Return to History, Foucault tries to delineate Structuralism from Historicism. Basically, structuralists deal with change and events while historians deal with time and the past (p. 423). Still, this seems to me like a distinction without a substantial difference. The devil, on the other hand, is in the details. The structuralist theory of an event is used to decouple that event from (similar) events. The structuralist does this by asking the following questions: What are the connections of differences and what conditions cause the transformations? The historian’s work establishes relations. He does this by manipulating (which seems like a loaded term) and processing a set of homogenous documents related to a particular object and epoch, and unraveling the relations between these documents as a body (p. 427). By unraveling the documents and their facts, he can know the layers of an event, especially those that were not known before (pp. 427-428. The historical analysis doesn’t appear to be a single timeline, either. Instead, there are layers of time, and durations, some longer than others and vice versa. The events that categorize an epoch for a historian, thus, must be differentiated, as well (p. 430).

However, they’re not utterly different. Both historians and structuralists treat their documents with a view toward the external and internal relations of the period they’re investigating (p. 430). Secondly, neither structuralists nor historians treat history as a biological metaphor. Foucault argues that if they were to recognize history as a biological event, they would be incapable of revolution. The slow changes wrongly associated with evolutionary development would not allow for something like a revolution to occur (p. 431). However, as readers look back on this statement today, it should appear inaccurate if they understand evolutionary biology and development. From what I recall of West-Eberhard’s, Jablonka's, and Lamb’s works, it's evident that revolutionary occurrences can occur biologically, especially during periods of significant stress.

How do all these ideas relate to each other?

Foucault’s epistemological and methodological work in archeological and genealogical studies of history fit in, I think, very nicely with his work in aesthetics and his ethical work. Foucault’s ethical work heavily emphasizes four major factors: space, writing, self-observation, and meditative work that checked one’s self-development while his aesthetic work provided numerous examples of how he developed his ethical ideas. His aesthetics significantly emphasizes truth, environment, and the written word. As it concerns his archeological and genealogical methods, these seven variables are evident, as well.

His entire archeological model, specifically his discursive, archeological model, significantly emphasizes the written word, understanding an author’s word, his language, rules for formulating his work, the language’s meaning within his work, and how that work can be interpreted culturally. Here we can see echoes of his emphasis on the correspondence and hupomnēmata, which are also evident – as I previously stated – in his work on What is an Author?. We also see an example of this discursive model in his work My Body, This Paper, This Fire. Foucault seemingly chastises Derrida for his switch from Latin to French, but I think there’s more to this piece than it first appears.

What Foucault points to is the difficulty ideas have moving from one culture to another, especially when two people do not speak the same language. Along with his work in Different Spaces, one could be left with the impression that Foucault does not see cultural transference as a mere blending of ideas. His concept of heterotopia, along with his historical and archeological investigations, seems to imply that identity, as it is manifested contemporarily, is multi-modal but discrete within a space where it might be assumed to be homogenous; i.e., identity is contemporarily fractured. The problematic of identity also is evident in his exploration of effective or Nietzschean history. If one cannot accurately develop his identity, and there is generally nothing wrong with him, and none of his peers can develop their identities either, nor form a group identity, there is probably something about the space(s) they’re residing within that’s prohibiting the development of that identity for its personal benefit; there is something within the environment that benefits from people who have fractured identities.

What might this thing be? In The Prose of Actaeon, the play on truth is explored. This play is like a set of games within a game that serves the game’s players, i.e., feed their desires or will to power. This game, effectively, requires them to lie. They wear masks that hide their true intentions, hence the reference to the masquerade, as was made evident in his work on Nietzschean historical analysis.  For someone to confront them, these masked actors, with the truth, to reveal to them for what they are, to dismantle their entire game before their eyes, to unveil the game for what it is, is to dispossess them of the mechanisms by which they can seemingly feed their desire for power. An identity that asserts itself in this way, as the Nietzschean or Machiavellian identity is apt to do, an identity that dismantles the game by reconfiguring it to show, not only its internal rules, but the cause behind those internal rules (e.g., the cause of interpretation), is an identity that cannot be reconciled by the set of games composing the social structure. The person who points to these simulacra of truth is not inherently mad, nor is their group, they are not unable to work, care for themselves, or lazy, and they are not necessarily emotionally unwell; they literally cannot be integrated into the game’s network because they understand it for what it is: a power fantasy. However, the locus of the problem is at that point where the roles of these masked actors are generated, which prevents them from seeing the truth for their desires, if I understand Foucault correctly. To understand, this issue more thoroughly, we must look at the totality of Foucault's work covered thus far.

To me, Foucault’s ethical mode is a genuinely profound one. It is based upon a discursive, epistemological methodology that – according to Foucault – may not give someone an absolute understanding of someone else’s perspective but can certainly grant them the opportunity to imagine what it is like to be the author of the field (connaissance), a group they’re exploring. His discursive mode thus enables its operator to place himself – as if he were in a dream – in the shoes of the person or group he’s analyzed. This meditative, dream exercise, not significantly different from his waking state, allows him to see how the heterotopia he could reside within might impact his ethical, self-development more fully. In conjunction with a proper genealogical and historical analysis of this problem, i.e., a Nietzschean and Machiavellian historical analysis, observing how differentiation has manifested and evolved within a culture through the accumulation of error and conflict over time, he can get a better grip on what is preventing the actualization of his identity. However, what this will effectively point him towards are the categories people have adopted to adapt to the environment they’ve found themselves within. These categories, rather than being a product of one’s self-development, are more often than not provided to people and feed off their desires; specifically, to people unable to develop an ēthos. The specific categories to which I am referring, and by no means all categories, are Power-Knowledge. I.e., they are the product of the interaction between certain scientific fields and bodies of authority that prescribe and delimit the behavior that benefits Power. There is the locus of those masked roles. With his discursive, epistemological understanding of the morphology of the field he’s studied, in conjunction with his genealogical understanding of his identity, one can, in theory, interact with the field he’s explored and develop his identity from within it and without. I.e., as suggested in his work on Boulez, he must use the system’s rules against itself and invert them to favor his identity.

These kinds of power games are, I think, quite explicitly discussed in his ethical research. The idea of the problematic highlights this phenomenon nicely, as well. Forcing the system to resolve its internal contradictions by understanding its formal rules better than it does enables an individual to develop his identity from within a system that, if he made himself apparent to it, would probably destroy him.  He must destroy the truths of that system that have calcified and become mere tools for Power without letting that system destroy him. He must be willing to sacrifice and destroy the appearance of truth for truth itself.  

Bibliography

Foucault M. and Faubion J. D. (editor) (1994). Michele Foucault: Aesthetics, Methods, and Epistemology. Editions Gallimard.