<<TRANSMATHOME

0.5 Discourse, Epistemes and Identical Terms

Within one term there are many and varied incarnations. Before beginning a text, through the title or the nouns of the title, and through the library source of the title, the reader is already conditioning her/himself to the limits of the term discussed, to the particular incarnation the term will have in the context of a particular discursive genre, and hence a fixed idea of what the term is, and what knowledges or discussion it will produce - for the moment and only within that text. What happens then, when before defining and hence limiting a term (a project I do not wish to do), certain ‘other’ texts such as basic medical, psychology [20] or even neurophysiological texts are brought into the discussion? These types of discourse are usually foreign to, but in this book are juxtaposed intimately with, everyday ‘cultural’ texts. Hence their presence and position become unsettling to the logic or evolution of the discussion. ‘Other’ texts are read and analyzed no longer with their traditional usage in mind, that is, as medical texts meant only for the lab or only as guides around a laboratory-situated body. Similarly, the neurophysiological or even certain basic medical texts, such as forensic pathology texts, will be read out of their context as guides meant for particular practices. Rather they will be read as texts without a specified purpose. Their effect and possible applications will be located in the realm of the possible. These texts will be analyzed and offered as catalysts for thought and action in a manner, and through a language, for which they were not intended.

This book could not have been written without Foucault’s studies, however unlike Foucault, whose emphasis is on excavating and elucidating the historically and genealogically transient nature of empirical sciences which claim(ed) to be constant, and by their formulations created the very constancy they claimed to ‘discover’, I am not ready to analyze entire streams of sciences, or to undermine any of their claims. I am particularly concerned only with the effects of taking science texts out of their specific plane, that is as guides for finding objective results within established modes of operation and comprehension. This defies a certain cultural logic, more than just a scientific logic. I am taking these texts as texts without a predicated function, out of their ‘order of things’, where the texts stand in an ordering of epistemic divisions from other texts but also the contents of the texts are ‘in order’ that they may be utilized in a particular way. I wish to explore the terms ‘pleasure’, ‘perversion’ and ‘death’, as potentials for opening up, as a transformative affect antagonistic to scientific versions of these terms. Foucault traces the changes in science while I am seizing one moment in history by placing science texts next to cultural texts of roughly the same moment in order to produce an analysis of the singularity (and lack thereof) of these terms; terms both the sciences and cultural theory embrace but usually on entirely different levels.

Foucault’s The Order of Things excavates the archaeology [21] of scientific discursive formulation. By way of general introduction, Foucault focuses on two important ideas: 1) The splintering of unified Classical discourse into divided and sealed epistemes [22] that aim to produce truths and that claim complete independence from all other epistemes or languages, and 2) The production of an object for study by an episteme. Any object is formulated by the practices and aims of the episteme that wishes to excavate the working truths of the object. The episteme claims objective analysis of an object, which exists outside discourse and subjectivity, yet forms that very object through its epistemic language, practice and enquiry. Foucault’s emphasis is on classical, dominant and singular discourse and the split within the human sciences into many languages, which subsequently claim their own truths and hence exhibit their own genealogies over a relatively short period of time. He does not define these hybrid languages, which inevitably become empirical languages claiming truth, as discourse. Bruce Fleming claims,

Foucault calls the speech of the Classical age ‘discourse’ and characterizes the modern age as an age lacking discourse. The delineation of the modern age from the Classical is not merely an alteration in languages, or the disappearance of discourse and the substitution for it of a mass of languages (‘language in a multiplicity of modes of being’). It is also the fragmentation of the parts of language and a stilling of them. [23]

The fragments, which resulted from the split, are hermeneutically closed off, and importantly made private in their methodology, so that the truths they aspire towards are empowered by the particularity and privacy of their languages and practices.  These fractions of discourse are epistemes, which function as separate systems and hence any outside languages are discouraged from entering such particular epistemic systems. A hierarchical system is thus produced, which emphatically divides each body of knowledge from all others. This separation occurs despite the fact that crossovers in different epistemic languages have led to important discoveries. Payne writes,

Foucault observes that some of the most significant advances in knowledge have occurred when by ‘analogies among the epistemes’, a given science breaks out from its restrictive confines - for example, to determine truth by economic and political constructions alone - and forms a hybrid with another science. [24]

Here the objects that epistemes of truth create would similarly become hybrid, [25] although the cross-pollination of epistemes may not be a desirable aim considering the independent truths each episteme aims to excavate and the unique practices towards such truths which epistemes utilize. Objects awaiting the excavation of their apparent truth are plastic in their dependence on the language and methods, (and the scientists who posit these languages and methods) of the science that studies them, and also on the openness of the science to another methodology or concept. Foucault’s mentor Georges Canguilhem states:

In the nineteenth century, the substitution of biology for natural history, or the substitution of a theory of production for an analysis of wealth, resulted in the constitution of a unified object of study: life or work. In contrast the unity of the old grammar was shattered without being replaced by any sort of unique and unifying renewal. [26]

The unified grammar of classical discourse was, thus, replaced with many languages in which even an identical term signified completely disparate meanings.  Theoretically this breakdown could have been a positive step, indicating an acceptance of multiplicity. Epistemes exist, however, in competition with one another, not so much in order to find truth most rapidly, but to validate the power of their respective and inimitable methodology and the unique results each produces in comparison with other methodologies.

The shattering of a single discourse produced a preference for the formulation of objects of study over unified (and potentially self-reflectively accountable) theories of practices and actions - objects are figured as existing ‘outside’ of discourse in a realm of absolute truth waiting to be known. Practices and actions are then formulated after the object of study is located, although they formulate the objects as a result of their respective interests and aims. Both aspects presume the object before it is ‘objectively’ studied by formulating specific practices and actions prior to the object being studied as well as after it is located. This particular ordering presents practices and actions as secondary to the objects for which they are formulated to study. Theories of practice are rendered invisible in comparison with the importance given to the object of analysis, thereby diminishing the importance of justifying theoretical and methodological practices. Privileging of object over theoretical practice has ethical implications; practices are not always justified - only attaining knowledge of the object of analysis is important. For this reason an analysis of any singular term within modern epistemic ‘shattered’ knowledge frequently involves entering into the study of an object or ‘thing’, rather than a process, affect and transformation. My theoretical focus prefers the latter form of analysis. Because current scientific theories play a large part in this book, however, I use The Order of Things to demonstrate the epistemic antagonism produced when scientific terms focus on objects rather than processes. The ways in which the linguistic value of the words ‘pleasure’, ‘perversion’ and ‘death’ are implicitly involved with an object (us) before they exists as processes will become clear through this analysis.

Foucault states, in the preface to the English edition of The Order of Things, that his project is to archaeologically excavate the aim of the sciences; first, the empirical sciences of biology, economy and philology which then gave birth to the human science counterparts of psychology, sociology and art/literature, (hereon called simply arts). He points to the order that makes possible the ordering of discourse, both within itself and in reference to other discourses aiming for the same ‘order’, but elucidates that this order is never itself elucidated, never drawn up or explicitly listed. The human sciences then follow rules of the empirical sciences that are themselves never set out. They are what Foucault calls the “positive unconscious of knowledge.” [27]   He states

It is these rules of formation, which were never formulated in their own right, but are to be found only in widely differing theories, concepts and objects of study, that I have tried to reveal, by isolating at their specific locus, a level that I have called, somewhat arbitrarily, archaeological. [28]

Rules of formation all aim towards an excavation of knowledge of ‘concepts and objects of study’. Where Foucault points out that the rules of formation for discourses apply to widely differing theories, it becomes clear that within widely differing theories, the object of study is an entirely different object, even if theories follow the same rules of objective analysis. This is so even when the object across the different theories is the same. So the human sciences that aspire to knowledge which can be repeatedly performed in order to indicate some form of truth or predictability are nonetheless aiming their theories at a different object than that of the empirical sciences.  Foucault traces the object of study first from the ‘Classical’ period of science, which he locates around the pre-sixteenth century. In this time, the object of analysis was part of a world where all objects were unified through resemblance; all theories revolved around the ability to relate an object to something familiar in order that it too become familiar. These interdependent patterns are what Foucault calls similitude, or resemblance.

At the onset of the Baroque period a transformation in thought occurs, where the object which resembles becomes an idol, and dangerously irrational. The world, due to the change in scientific thought from unity to object-ivity, becomes instead a teeming mass of unique and incomparable entities, later called organisms. The classification of discourse, which occurred simultaneously, mirrored the sentiment that organisms are tightly independent formations to be analyzed only as much as they are unlike anything else. Foucault argues against the sealing off of scientific language, “natural history cannot and should not exist as a language independent of all other languages unless it is a well constructed language - and a universally valid one” [29] yet points out its failure to be such as language.

Natural history can be a well constructed language only if the amount of play in it is enclosed: if its descriptive exactitude makes every proposition into an invariable pattern of reality (if one can always attribute to the representation what is articulated in it) and if the designation of each being indicates clearly the place it occupies in the general arrangement of the whole. [30]

The aim of the empirical sciences - and at the highest point of the general arrangement stands the human - is to map out the pattern of reality they see in the human body: that all bodies are alike and that the interior of all bodies, whether it be brain, or blood, are unto themselves independent bodies that are also alike. The body is ordered, its organs are ordered and their functions, both physiologically and significantly, are ordered. Foucault points out the need for things to be describable in language and by becoming describable they become entities for study. They then become order-able among but never like other entities. The reluctance Foucault exhibits towards elucidating a relationship between science and language is because of the unaccountability of things such as “individual experiences, needs or passions, habits, prejudices, a more or less awakened concentration…”. [31] Can we only think materiality then through language and what happens when we forego language for non-signifiable affect?

The masquerading of subjectivity and persons behind formulations of truths of science is the best place to start a juxtaposition of medical and cultural theory. For indeed, Foucault levels at scientific discourse or language the very criticism that science claims makes other discourses fallible and essentially untrue, that of subjective intervention. Is the aim of scientific discourse to transcend language, because language must originally or eventually be spoken, written or formed in certain patterns (called scientific laws) by someone in order to address a newly discovered ‘truth’? Science, however, exists and is re-produced only within the language through which it allows its statements to come into being. As a result of this dependence on language, science empowers and specializes itself, alienating itself from other epistemes by making its speech unique, difficult to understand outside itself, and claims its language as simply a means to make repeatable the concepts it speaks. The language of science is that which enables scientists to communicate their findings, which seem to exist outside of language, hence language becomes somewhat of a ‘necessary evil’, a communicative rather than a creative device. It also defines itself as unable to express a subject, and here is where it differs most radically from a casual understanding of language. Language is safe for science only if a subject never speaks it, or it is written in a book never to be read simply or only as a book, which is exactly what I plan to do with it. Taking scientific language out of its particular text-into-practice intention does not necessarily change its meaning. Rather, it alters the phantasy of objectivity, and creates subjective statements out of hitherto discursively private communications. By reading scientific texts as books only, they are not read in order to recreate the experiments described within them and hence cement the knowledge claimed in their conclusions, or alter that knowledge only within the traditional practical parameters through which the original conclusions were achieved. By taking the texts out of their hierarchical arboreal order and their practical application intention, (their ‘in order to’) and placing them on a more rhizomatic plane, they stand alongside all other texts in a horizontal configuration. They have no more or less claims to permanence and predictable function than a novel or a film, but their intention towards knowledge of true objects in the world will still be considered. This practice elucidates both author and reader as subjects.

Before discussing the specifics of taking science out of context, I am going to look a little at why science reaffirms the importance of context. Foucault points out that all languages work upon a system of ordering, [32] from empirical sciences to the human sciences that attempt to adapt/adopt a ‘scientific’ order. Constancy of language affirms constancy of ideas and findings, of protocol and practice, within any scientific discourse. Although Foucault has already pointed out the flaws of the phantasy of a truthful scientific language, the desire to believe in the objective reproducibility and predictable reception of a language is a means by which any science excavates the reproducibility, and separateness, of any knowledge. Belief in linguistic objectivity offers potential for change only in response to the needs and the aims of the scientists empowered through this practice, where knowledge and access to it is tempered by the reception of such a language. The phantasy of speaking objectively is reflected in the phantasy of receiving language objectively. Because scientific epistemic languages are accessible most readily to those trained to comprehend them, the language, methodology, tolerance of, and directions of growth of an episteme reflect directly the scientists’ own desires, and hence power to constitute knowledge. Uniqueness of epistemic language is how the scientist is inducted into being scientist but it is also where others are denied access.

The language of science is sacred, to science, or perhaps, sacred to the scientist who has access to and interest in such a practice. Even more so the language of science creates sacredness between scientist and non-scientist, where certain grammatology distances the non-scientist from the scientific world and often needs to be translated into a more popular language form to be popularly comprehended. It is a means of communicating knowledges isolated by science, and the isolation of knowledges that may be repeated over and over mirrors the repetition of words used only in their strictest sense. Any change in interests reflects the shifts in power dynamics, which dictate where such change is suitable in conformity with the desires of the practitioners, be they corporate or individual. As experiments must be repeated under close scrutiny in order to remain constant, language in any science must be repeated meticulously to affirm its power. The pleasure of science is not a subjective process able to be expressed by a human scientist [33] but an object that must be expressed by empirical language. The aim of science is to excavate an a priori knowledge and to maintain its meaning, or the potentials of the dynamics of such meaning, in the reception of the language and the imagery of science, by demanding this reception, or reading, remain constant, or at least constantly monitored within the parameters of the episteme. Hence, there is room for change only within the system. Where human sciences seem more open to interpretation, within a certain limit, medical discourse sees interpretation as failure and the activity of diagnosis (and misdiagnosis) is seen as a necessary evil along the path to predictable and repeatable knowledge of the body. Medical science and its aims can be expressed in words such as repetition of event, constancy and identical reception of information. The physical human body, representing knowledge before the scientist, changes only within the sanctioned parameters of the practices and aims of the language of medicine, and is never different from another body, yet is different from everything else. Such a body comes to be constituted by, and reflect the aims of the science that analyzes it, so that science creates the very body it aspires to observe. Certain bodies, constituted scientifically, come to represent all other bodies in the episteme in which they speak. The object of scientific analysis is as similar to itself as it is unique from all other things. In this sense, science can be received as a form of representation as much as an episteme of objectivity. Certain bodies are necessarily represented differently from other bodies as much in various biological, pathological and anatomical epistemes as in film, television, art, print media and literature. The use of these languages varies in their social effect and application but none should be privileged as being less objective or more volitional in the representations of different subjects and the cultural effect of these representations. There is a temptation to deconstruct visual popular culture representations of gender or race more severely or critically than anatomical or pathological representations of flesh or disease supposedly isolated to certain genders, races or sexualities. This book will take epistemes claiming objectivity as up for representative analysis as much as and not in an entirely different way to film and popular visual culture.

Specialization, a concrete and lucid result of the classification of the world explicated by Foucault, depends entirely on the isolation of one discourse from all others. It is a further fracturing of fractured classical discourse. The cementing of knowledge, which reflects the power to create knowledge itself, forms along a micro-hierarchy within the macro-ordering of things. Foucault suggests modern science moves toward a focus on function over the classical model of description. Function is inextricable from the value placed on an object for its capital worth or ‘work’ - its normality or its pathology. [34] . Ironically, it is the ever-further seeing eye of the microscope which describes the body in modern medicine that allows the concept of function to come into play; so what is seen is that which functions. The human sciences, especially the arts, are imagined as all description and no function (a situation that this book seeks to remedy), as discourses not activated toward immutable knowledge but rather of describing and requiring passivity (watching, looking, listening) of subjectivity. Arts are phantasized as being created by a subject, while science is required to excavate those things that no human subject created, and hence must be understood after the fact. The subject is extricated from the medical sciences in order for objectivity to ignite progress at a constant(ly fast) pace, and to masquerade any interest in anything other than knowledge, which includes imagining knowledge to exist without power, or without reflecting the accessibility of certain persons to such knowledge. By utilizing the discourses of various streams of medicine in a cultural manner, subjectivity is mingled with objectivity, description replaces (but not without residue) evolutionary change in empirical knowledge and knowledge is re-submerged in the linguistic gaps of interpretation and hitherto uncommon access - for women, for minoritarians. My intention is to excavate a space of play, an area of interpretations, or rather a means toward a new space of interpretations, which is currently discouraged by the fiercely discrete boundaries of different discourses. I prefer a space of play to a new anti-epistemic teleology because any adamant contraposition version of the order of things would potentially close off discussions on the potentials of differing discourse. Closing off a discussion of access and power implications of such discourse would simultaneously disavow the ambiguity of language, practice and knowledge, a condition that predisposes it to different modes of utilization and access for different subjects. [35] My aim is to explore what happens when like terms from unlike discourses are compared. I aim to read medical texts not in the way in which they were intended to be read. I am not a medical doctor so any mis-reading may open up such a space of play, rather than a mistake or misunderstanding. Philosophy itself in its best incarnations avoids the concept of ‘misreading’ for proliferation of meaning of any text or idea. I hope to understand medical texts not as a means by which to know the human brain or body but as a way of taking a look at what is forbidden culturally, and allowed medically, and vice versa. By reading the texts in this way a fuller understanding of the potential for ambiguity of meaning and the non-isolation of any term within any discourse is my project.