Unknown Knowns : The Subjugated Knowledge of Terrorism Studies (2012) - R. Jackson

New post on Foucault News

Unknown knowns: The subjugated knowledge of terrorism studies (2012) by Clare O'Farrell Jackson, R. Unknown knowns: The subjugated knowledge of terrorism studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Volume 5, Issue 1, April 2012, Pages 11-29 Abstract This article employs Foucault's concept of 'subjugated knowledges' to explore forms of knowledge which provide explanations of the nature, causes and solutions to terrorism and political violence, but which have been suppressed and silenced within the terrorism studies field. Subjugated knowledges include historical knowledges that are present within the functional and systemic ensemble of terrorism studies itself, but which have been masked by more dominant forms of knowledge, as well as knowledges outside of the field that have been disqualified and excluded as naïve, inferior or below the required level of scientificity. This article analyses some of the primary mechanisms and processes by which knowledge subjugation takes place in terrorism studies and the consequences of such suppressions and exclusions. It argues that the presence of subjugated knowledge means that the field exists in a highly unstable condition where certain forms of knowledge are simultaneously known and unknown and where eruptions of subjugated knowledge periodically destabilise the dominant discourse. Among others, the rise of critical terrorism studies represents such an eruption in the field. The article concludes by suggesting that one of the key future tasks of critical terrorism studies must be to liberate a range of potentially important subjugated knowledges and that Bourdieu's concept of the 'collective intellectual' provides a potentially important model for undertaking this difficult task. Author keywords Foucault; peace studies; subjugated knowledge; terrorism studies Clare O'Farrell | 2 October 2012 at 6:00 am | Categories: Journal articles | URL:http://wp.me/p13ybx-Aj

Foucault revisited for the Digital Humanities - Guido Koller

Because this post is so excellent I have re-posted from:

http://wethink.hypotheses.org/280 

Foucault revisited for the Digital Humanities

Posted on 10/05/2012 by Guido Koller

Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir, Gallimard, 1969

Review with respect to digital humanities (avant la lettre)

Also historians have succumbed to the temptations of structuralism. For quite some time now, they have not been working anymore with events, but with developments, including those of longue durée, as Ferdinand Braudel has called them. Michel Foucault speaks of deposits, layers, which are now being investigated: For example the history of the cereal or the gold mines, of the starvation or growth. In such a history we are no more talking about chains of events, but about series types and periodization.

This contrasts with the philosophy, which focuses its attention on fractures. Its interest is on the effects of interruptions and boundaries. The problem is no longer the foundation of a term or an idea, but rather its transformation. In the center of the history of thought now is discontinuity.

What are the two different developments based on? On challenging the document, Foucault says. The document was treated as “the language of the silenced voice”, as its decipherable trace. The document was a material through which the past should have been reconstructed. Historiography is now looking for relations in the documentary structure itself. It wants to give form to a mass of documents. So, documents become monuments and historiography becomes archeology – to a description immanent of the monument. Henceforth it is, as mentioned, all about series and about relations between these series.

Thus discontinuity is becoming the essential element – instrument and object – of the historical analyses. The possibility of a “global history” is being blurred in favor of the option of a “universal” (or “general”) history. It is about the overall shape of a culture, a system of homogenous relations that can be found in all areas of society. Thus the “new history” encounters the problem of constructing coherent document corpuses; the problem of the selection principle; of specifying methods of analysis; of the delimitation of quantities that structure the material to be examined.

The “general” or “new history” leaves all questions about the teleology of becoming and the relativity of historical knowledge in favor of questions that are to be found in linguistics and anthropology – in short: in structuralism. This gives the tension between structure and history a new meaning.

Remark / interjection: According to the Google Ngram Viewer the term “event” was more frequently used than the term “structure” until the 1930th. Since 1965, the term “structure” experiences a real hype.

This change in the episteme is not complete yet. Until now, history was a correlate of the subject; Its function was to maintain the sovereignty of the subject against all decentering: Historiography set the rationality of the telos against the analysis of the conditions of production by Marx, of the psyche by Freud and of transcendence by Nietzsche. A history that is not incision but becoming, not system but labor on freedom. And this history which is related to the synthetic activity of the subject disappears, as already mentioned before.

***

Historiography is detached from a whole complex of terms (and ideas): “Tradition”, for example, allowed to consider the dispersion of history in the form of the same; “influence” brought similar phenomena into connection with a process of causality; “development” related a sequence of events dispersed in time and space to a single organizational principle, and from there to a hypothetical origin and end; “mentality” established a community of sense, allowed as a unifying principle the existence of a collective consciousness. Even the units “book” and “work” are not backed up: A certain number of characters mark the boundaries of a text and a certain number of texts can be assigned to an author, indeed; but: the discursive unity of a text is never clean and severely cut, it is a knot in a net in which one text refers to others texts. Foucault wants to have a “pure description of discursive events” as a horizon for the study of a particular object.

 ***

 Archaeology in the meaning of Foucault defines discourses as practices obeying certain rules. The discourse is not a document, a sign for something else, but a monument. The archaeology defines types and rules of discursive practices that “pass through” original works. How this archaeology is going to treat change, the phenomena of succession and alteration? How does it structure the relation between diachrony and synchrony? If a particular discursive formation just enters at the place of another – is time then not simply being bypassed, does then the possibility of a historical description not simply disappear?

The archaeology – always in Foucault’s sense – defines the rules of the formation of a set of statements and their correlation to the events. It distinguishes several levels: the level of the statements; the level of appearance of the objects, of the types of statements, of the terms; the formation level of new rules; and the level of substitution of a discursive formation with another. Thus, science is emerging on the threshold of the 19^th century. The amount of discursive elements that is necessary to constitute science is knowledge. Instead of the axis consciousness – knowledge – science, that keeps to the subject, Foucault’s archaeology follows an axis discursive practice – knowledge – science. What it describes is not science in its specific structure, but the field of knowledge.

L’archéologie du savoir is neither historiography nor philosophy. It is a discourse about discourses. It describes the decentration, which would recognize no place, no subject as a privilege. The discourse has not the task “to dissolve the oblivion and to recover in the depth where they are silent, the moment in which things have been said”. It does not collect the original, does not remember the truth, is not the “presence of history in its conscious form”.

***

 What does it mean for the Digital Humanities, to “visit” Michel Foucault again? Hisarchéologie du savoir anticipates the decentration that we have found with Jacques Derrida, and confirms the importance of structure, the discontinuity in history and the fracture in the episteme. In addition to this it deconstructs the meaning of the document and of the terms used in the “old historiography”. Against this, it constitutes discursive practices whose position in opposition to the events is rather vague. These discourses are not sign and play as with Derrida. And they give the subject no consolation as the “old history” did. Knowledge has no purpose outside of itself. It emerges and vanishes in ever new formations. If we follow its traces and think and write about it, we are creating at best a new branch of a particular discursive formation. No matter whether analog or digital. Foucault deals with statements, in any form. The acceleration and liquefaction of discourses that impress Wolfgang Schmale, would have confirmed Foucault in his analysis of the episteme. He knew that texts are knots in a net of discursive practices, as in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s book “In 1926”, and it wouldn’t have surprised him to find them on a screen. But there is also Foucault's observation, that historians are working with developments , including those of longue durée, as Ferdinand Braudel has called them. Foucault speaks of layers, which are now being investigated. In such a history we are talking about series and periods. Would this work with the Digital History? On the one hand, Schmale for instance says clearly no and reserves the traditional monography for such long and complicated narratives. On the other, the digital techology provides the instruments to deal with large quantities, statistics and algorithms. So the question remains an open one, at least for the moment. Either way: L’archéologie du savoir is a text that in its depth would have absorbed the digital revolution without much further notice. 

!FUCK Is A Word Is A Word Is A Word That Means EVERYTHING You Want It To Mean!

http://youtu.be/26UA578yQ5g

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11653&st=180&p=155727&#entry155727

George H. Smith, on 12 February 2012 - 07:14 PM, said:

seymourblogger, on 12 February 2012 - 06:49 PM, said:

In fact there is no truth. It has become just a word. Like fuck. Meaningless.

You think the word "fuck" is meaningless? Maybe you should try a different discourse.

And then to my great good luck and fortune

ninthdoctor posted this youtube on fuck

to prove me wrong!

Ho ho ho and a kettle of rum!

Baudrillard on Implosion

Following Nietzsche of course

Excess leads to annihilation

Even Bill of  AA says this: Touch bottom first!
Hear that Michael Stuart Kelly!

How do you like this different Discourse, George H. Smith of the best selling atheist best seller!

Beaucoup thanks to ninthdoctor for his youtube Discourse

Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy - A Method: End To Interpretation

In talking with you about Nietzsche, I was thinking tn particular of the genealogical method which enables us to uncover what lies hidden behind ideas, to see their real basis. (Francois L'Yvonnet in Fragments - Baudrillard p.2)

link to goodreads

The Foucauldian genealogy is an unmasking of power for the use of those who suffer it. It is also directed against those who would seize power in their name. As Francois Ewald pints out, there are three, not two, parties to every power struggle: not only those who exercise power and those who would exercise it in their place, but also those on whom it is exercised. Because one speaks against power, one does not necessarily speak with those who suffer it. Hence Foucault's concerted attack on all forms of interpretation and representation: on the use made of the linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson, on psychoanalysis, on Marxism. For the interpreter, things are never what they seem. People never say what they mean or mean what they say; they never know  what they want or what they are doing.

For Foucault interpretation is reduction, repression, obliteration of fact, discourse, and desire. It is a technique of knowledge; it is also a technique of power. Interpretation requires specially qualified interpreters, representatives.  The dialectic is an interpreter's weapon for the seizure of power.

The regime of 'truth' gave the intellectual, whose business truth was, a certain 'universal' status. The 'disinterested' intellectual represented the conscience of society as a whole. 

But Foucault shows that truth does not exist outside power, still less in opposition to it.  Each society has its own regime of truth: the types of discourse accepted as true, the mechanisms that make it possible to distinguish between truth and error. ... The will to the power of truth is a pitiless tyrant; it requires a singular and total devotion.  It is a service that has tempted the European mind since Plato. Nietzsche gave the first signs of its possible end; he also provided a way out, which is called genealogy.  Genealogy was a 'grey' activity, but it was also a gay science, a science of the hypothetical. That gaiety, that love of hypothesis, pervades all Foucault's work. He is the reverse of a guru, a teacher, a subject who is supposed to know, though he would, in all modesty, be flattered if, without excessive seriousness, he were compared to a Zen master, who knows nothing.  For him uncertainlty causes no anguish:...

A love of hypothesis, of invention, is unashamedly, a love of the beautiful. What drew Foucault to the case of  Pierre Riviere was not the mass of official documentation, but the beauty of Riviere's memoir, a beauty that shamed the dreary prose of the educated experts who busied themselves around him. It was a daring, provocative remark,  suggesting that beauty of expression in an indication that what is being said is worth listening to. The question of Foucault's own style is not insignificant. It is not so much that Foucault writes well _...It is rather that he writes  with ostentatious brilliance: his writing betrays a quite shameless delight in its own skill that calls to mind the sumptuous prose of our own pre-classical period....To write in this way is no affectation or self-indulgence.  It is, if it requires justification, functional. Like all style, it is both natural and cultivated:a natural mode of expression for a writer striving to renew contact with a pre-rational world of communicating Reason and Folly and a conscious rejection of the language of Reason that seeks by its grey, measured, monotonous tones to give an impression of authority, objectivity and truth. (221-4)

All of the above is a quote from Alan Sheridan's Foucault The Will To Truth (p. 219-224)

For a genealogy of the movie Eclipse see here.



Reading Ayn Rand Through The Foucauldian Cut of Nietzchean Genealogy

I am starting with The Fountainhead just because I am. Atlas Shrugged is even more so. Both these novels incised a Foucauldian "cut" through the best selling literary Dominating Discourse of their day. No neither were literary masterpieces of cultural eminence. No matter. -  Neither were the Campbell Soup Cans of Warhol, but they cut into art history and ushered in POP art.

 Warhol "cut" into  Art History

But that's not the point. Both were "cuts" in the Dominating Discourse. What she wrote was not allowed. The DD determines who can say what, when it can be said, what can be said, how it can be said, who can say it and where it can be said. If this is all new to you then I refer you to the work of Michel Foucault and all his works, the first two being The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge.

Foucault seized upon Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, saw genealogy as a tool to order knowledge into cuts.

"Knowledge is not for knowing; knowledge is for cutting." - Michael Foucault

Nowhere does anyone see that this is what Rand did. Only she did not universalize it as Foucault did and apply the Nietzchean tool to all knowledge. Instead Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals sank deep in her mind to change the way she thought. Nietzsche puts an end to God by saying God is dead. Baudrillard comments on this way of phrasing it. Nietzsche challenged God to appear. He dared God. He did not say there was no God. He said God is dead, a much different meaning.

Rand was completely convinced by Nietzsche's reasoning to declare herself an atheist, and Objectivism held atheism as a tenet. Rand finally broke with her friend, supporter, teacher and much more, Isabel Patterson, over this issue. Patterson believed in a creator, Rand did not, and they argued for years over it, until Rand just distanced herself from Patterson.

It is Nietzsche's tight reasoning using genealogy that interfaced with Rand's mind and her thinking. It did the same with Foucault. It began French post modernism thinking, replacing Levi-Strauss's structuralism theory.

This is how to read Rand through Nietzsche, not by media sound bites of what someone has picked up about Nietzsche. Rand backs away from Nietzsche in her journals, Foucault skims over him until the last years of his brilliant and powerful intellectual career, and finally says that he regretted not acknowledging Nietzsche's contribution to his work earlier in his career. The reason is obvious since no one wanted to stand beside Hitler's praise and misuse of Nietzsche, concerning the Holocaust, which Nietzsche would have disavowed if anyone had carefully read his Genealogy of Morals.

The philosophical, economic, psychological, social, aesthetic Dominating Discourses served to smother these novels as best they could. But when the Dominating Discourse changes, it is total. This is where Kuhn's Paradigm Change often gets confused with Foucault's cut, which is much more comprehensive. These novels cut, they cut through all the discourses of the above. This is its supreme importance. But only thinking genealogically will allow you to observe and see it.

An object does not exist until and unless it is observed. - William Burroughs

Nowhere on any page of these two biographies, or any reviewers, or Rand's disciples, is any of this seen. Foucault is not in the bibliographies nor the texts, nor the footnotes, nada anywhere. In fact neither Burns nor Heller seem aware that there is such a thing as post modern thinking. Burns's bibliography is so excessive it is obscene. It's scholarship is an embarrassment. I am not surprised that she was granted access to the ARI archives. She posed no threat at all. She did, however, provide endless tidbits of information. Information is NOT knowing.

Nietzsche is in Burns's bibliography as Thus Spake Zarathustra but no Genealogy of Morals. In Heller Nietzsche is in her bibliography under Beyond Good and Evil. She does mention Genealogy of Morals, but does not include it in her bibliography.

Rand is primarily a post modern theorist, who presented her theory via fiction. When she turned to non-fiction it disappeared. So we have it and at the same time it is masked, camouflaged, revealed and concealed.