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0.4 Foucault's Order Thing

My anxieties about abjection and its strict relationship with borders and transgression shifts towards the textually discursive in the following section. Like subjectivity, discourse exhibits a fear of transgressing certain borders of use, readership and intent. The following discussion sets up a model of Foucault's The Order of Things in order to preclude a repeated transgression of epistemic ordering throughout this book. By briefly exploring Foucault's archaeology of epistemic divide and some of the purposes and functions of this division some of the issues at stake within the function of division will be elucidated. Because the use of texts in this book shows no respect to the epistemic integrity of divided discourses, but instead conflates them into a massive textual body, which is referred to as 'culture' in general, it is important to first engage with why we care so deeply about respecting epistemic borders. When science textbooks, or psychology textbooks are read simply as texts alongside horror films, the truths of science and the supposed falsities of representation become fraternizing expressions from the same, and hence about, the same culture. From a feminist perspective any validation of hermeneutics, be they biological or cultural, must think both what is lost and what is gained from keeping different knowledges separate from each other. Hybridizing knowledge is neither better nor worse than epistemic discretion, but in order to validate difference (as process, as function or as possibility) any rigidly sustained system, such as epistemic division, should have its alternatives explored. An ethical thinking of difference is not a post-modern proliferation of 'anything-goes', smacking of a naughty boy defying his scientist and philosopher fathers. It is thinking difference in all epistemes, from the discursive to the corporeal, the political to the geographical and most importantly the possible. Division - of bodies, of texts (which insinuates the irreducible relationship between established ways of thinking and possibilities for future thought) has both function and effect. Difference is not the same as division. Division divides for a purpose/function (to establish hierarchy, to imprint patterns of possibility for the future, to enclose with knowledge and forge connections for future discoveries). Division may even, in a cynical sense, be seen to want to establish truths. Sometimes, for certain minorities such as women or non-heterosexuals, these dividing truths may not seem far from Levitican (the relationship between Foucault's interest in the archaeology of knowledge, truth and epistemic order and his interest in sexuality studies may not be arbitrary). Difference sees intensities, bodies and other 'tactical' rather than irrevocable separations as changing their function, effect, force and possibility in space, through transforming borders (one body, one polis, many within the self) and in time (pulsion). Writing on horror could mean a book about low art, about film, about bodies, about gore, about feminism, about philosophy, about medicine. In a divided sense it would be about one or two appropriately ordered epistemes (film and philosophy, or neurology and physiology). But this book is about attempting to think a self differently in the world, specifically divided differently to the demarcations proscribed by traditional philosophy (being or subjectivity) standpoint politics (speaking as…) and science (anatomy as destiny). The function of precluding this book with Foucault's Order of Things is to emphasize the importance of forging strange connections between differing discourses, bodies and intensities all at once. Rather than playing with less emphatic divisions (feminism and philosophy or feminism and horror for example) I will somewhat audaciously connect bodies as texts (in medical discourse) with images as material (film) and so not only epistemic order but the definition of the genus will be renegotiated (visual, actual, corporeal, discursive). Thus I will trace back though Foucault some of the functions of the division of knowledges that they may residually inform the reader outraged at my deliberate hubristic assembling of disparate epistemes, highlighting what is being transgressed, what is formed and what is lost through this experiment.

From a feminist perspective the analysis of science and other discourses of truth and knowledge as texts first and foremost written by a subject for other subjects is essential in order to excavate through whose truths we live our lives. The fact that I do not represent the 'appropriate' subject to read scientific texts, because I am not a scientist, because I will deliberately re-read or mis-read these texts, simply takes the feminist interpretation of such texts further. As the book progresses, scientific texts and offensive filmic texts will come to refer to identical terms, such as death, bodies and pleasure, and hence this conflation of the scientific with the popular will seem inevitable rather than forced. The discussion of The Order of Things is designed not as the cessation of the introduction but as a bridging section between the introduction and chapter one, 'Pleasure'. Ideas about orders, truths and epistemologies will resonate when the book approaches the subjects of pleasure, perversion and death. Integrity, as a vast idea which encompasses, defines and makes possible both bodies and sealed epistemic discourses, will be rethought theoretically through my conflation of sealed and ruptured bodies and sealed and ruptured texts.

An important feminist element of this book is its refusal to take for truth certain discursive epistemologies without considering the signifying regime of scientific (and all) discourse as the complexity of textbook, theory, bodies and material practice. This book values film as a mode for transformation, however it values scientific texts also, although no more and no less than the films it analyzes. Scientific texts hold the potential to be transformative in two ways. The first way locates the appropriateness of certain scientific epistemes - for what purpose is the episteme appropriate, within what system can it be accessed, comprehended and potentially altered, who should read this text, and to what does the text appropriately refer? Such a location predicts the affect-ive nature of a scientific text - that is, its educational or didactic purpose and its integration of the reading subject within the power of a traditional, constant and relatively consistent reaffirming logos of knowledge, a language as such. The truths science speaks should be deconstructed along with the scientist her/himself. Analyzing science through cultural studies, or indeed any episteme through another, shows some of the seemingly necessary or expected practices as manifestly constructed. Any common force of production within any field makes enquiries about the modes that enable such production difficult. Both science and all other epistemes found their knowledge on varyingly rigid notions of truth but further their knowledge through the continual admittance of falsity, of the constant possibility of being incorrect. The problem of truth occurs when commonness becomes the prerequisite for any ability to speak within an episteme. The hermeneutics of such a configuration demands analysis by, for and through, those or that, which are 'inappropriate' - non-scientific readers, for a non-scientific purpose, outside the regimented practices and languages that empower scientific discourses. Feminists, whether inside or outside the scientific realm, are just some of the more urgent inappropriate readers. The second transformative potential of scientific texts is their potential affect-iveness, ways in which they may change our thinking, our bodies and our modes of being, whether they are read within or outside of their system of logos. Science does not deny popular culture readership but it also does not encourage it. What science speaks, when deconstructed and possibly reconstructed as different, is a different form of what constitutes a text - it speaks different things and refers to different discursive languages, however it can just as easily be read as a text with no purpose or practice in mind. What then does the science text as just a text say about bodies and being? It is the potential answer to this question that may posit new ways of deconstructing the subject, or even new ways of being. What follows is a discussion of Foucault's genealogy of the sealing of epistemes into systems with their own languages and practices, scientific and humanistic. This book directly deconstructs the integrity, the privacy and hence the power of such systems by conflating contrary discursive genres onto one plateau of textuality that actively encourages ranging and connecting between textual epistemes to think unpredictable potential.

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