Discours, figure (Jean-François Lyotard, 1971)

Discourse, figure is Lyotard's second book of philosophy. The main thrust of this work is a critique of structuralism, particularly of Lacan's psychoanalysis. The book is divided into two parts:

1) Lyotard uses Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to undermine structuralism.
2) He uses Freudian psychoanalysis to undermine Lacan and certain aspects of phenomenology.

Lyotard begins with an opposition between discourse (related to structuralism and written text) and figure (a visual image related to phenomenology and seeing). He suggests that structured, abstract conceptual thought has dominated philosophy since Plato, denigrating sensual experience. The text and the experience of reading are associated with the former, and figures, images and the experience of seeing with the latter. He proceeds to deconstruct this opposition and attempts to show that discourse and figure are mutually implicated.

Thesis: Discourse contains elements of the figural (poetry and illuminated texts are good examples), and visual space can be structured like discourse (when it is broken up into ordered elements in order for the world to be recognisable and navigable by the seeing subject).

Ultimately, the point is not to privilege the figural over the discursive, but to show how these elements must negotiate with each other. The mistake of structuralism is to interpret the figural in entirely discursive terms, ignoring the different ways in which these elements operate. In the second part of Discours, figure, Lyotard suggests that structure and transgression are related to Freudian libidinal forces ( libido's energy, forces not mediated by rationality), and so, he paves the way for the libidinal philosophy developed in Libidinal Economy.

Heidegger for Beginners (LeMay, 1994)

Eric C. Lemay. Heidegger for Beginners. London: Writer and Reader, 1994.

"Technology will never allow itself to be overcome by man. That would mean, after all, that man was the master of Being".

According to Heidegger, philosophy's focus on humanity has helped cause the crisis of the modern world. Rather than recognising our place in the world, our status as one being among other beings, we have turned the world into something that exists for and because of us. Treating planet Earth as an expendable resource.

Heidegger says that many of the world's atrocities can be traced back to the supposedly harmless philosophical belief that we human beings are special, we give the world a 'frame of reference'. The connection between our technological world view and the concept of Being passed through Occidental philosophy.

Socrates - The unexamined life is not worth living
Parmenides - Can we come to know that which does not exist?
Pythagoras - Could Mathematics lie at the core of the universe?
Heraclitus - How do we comprehend a world that constantly changes?

Most relevant work comes from Plato and his 'Theory of Ideas' - each existing thing has a form - Anamnesis. Over the next two thousand years a list fo distinguished philosophers would refine, refute and transform Plato's ideas.

René Descates (1596-1650) and the absolute axiom 'Cogito, ergo sum' stems from a process he called 'radical doubt', his foundation for absolute knowledge. Jean-Jaques Rousseau (1712-1778) proposes the universal soul based on the Self and on Nature. In different ways, George Berkeley (1685-1753), John Locke (1632-1776) and David Hume (1711-1776) though Rousseau was a deluded idealist and stated that 'we know things from experiencing them, and then using this information as a base which to build more complex knowledge - not from going deep into the corridors of our own minds'. These Empiricist thinkers denied the grandiose of Rationalists thinkes such as Rousseau and Descartes (they argued the empiricists ignored the role of the mind in witnessing, recording and analysing sensory experience).

Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) proclaimed that the Self had innate structures that is used to take in all sensory information. He agreed with the Empiricists' claim that sensory experience is where we derive our knowledge but, at the same time, he gave Rationalists credit for realising that the human mind filters every experience in its own unique way.Along with structure like Time and Space, Kant came up with categories such as Unity, Reality, Substance and Possibility, which all help us filter experience. Kant presumed that we all have the same filters and , thus, by examining the categories of his own mind, Kant believed, like Rousseau, that he could generate universal human knowledge. In the realm of Ethics, Kant believed that all moral behaviour could be generated from a principle he called the 'Categorical Imperative'. In attempting to develop a flawless, hemertic system to explain the world, Kant ignored everyday facts like, people not always tell the truth.

Friedrich Nietzsch (1844-1900) took this line of critique to the extreme purporting Kant's philosophy as the most far-reaching false assumption in the history of philosophy. He says claims of Truth are claims of Power. All the lwas, canons and doctrines of groups claiming truth, according to Nietzsch were ways of oppressing our higher instincts. For him, the most coercive and oppressive claim to absolute truth was Christianity and proclaimed God is dead. To follow such laws means to conform to a 'Slave Morality'. In his denial of truth, Nietzsch rejected conventional moral values. Ideas like Kant's universal categories are not truths but functions of what Nietzsch called 'Will to Power'. Every organism lives to increase its life force.

Even before Nietzsch, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard threw into doubt ideas of truth, knowledge and God. He said we cannot know anything universal, anything tha transcends time because we are finite beings. He did not say God was dead and believed that subjectivity of the truth is important, so we must make 'Leaps of Faith'.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) contributes to debunk assumptions of all-encompassing philosophical systems, he believed that scientific knowledge was very useful but, did not help to understand 'Human Concerns'. To solve this discrepancy Husserl developed a philosophical method called Phenomenology, in order to describe 'experience' or 'awareness' of things in a manner which did not reduce them to scientific data.Husserl rescued everyday experience from the reductive limitations of science and developed a new, rigorous method od establishing knowledge. This method would inspire thinkers who felt the scientific approach to the world was impoverished.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was one of them. In 1927 he published Being and Time, the central focus of Heidegger's work brings us back to the fundamental mystery of existence. According to him, ever since philosophers began asking questions about the world, they overlooked the fact that the world exists. Since Plato Philosophers have been focusing on the things of the world but not on the world in itself.

The significance of this basic condition of existence he dubbed 'Being', while 'beings' are those entities which exist in the world. Opposite to the idea of Being there is 'The Nothing' or non-existence. In between these two possibilities there are temporal 'beings'. Previous approaches, such as Plato's and Descartes, ignored the everyday world and gone in serach of some extraordinary principle that would explain the world.

Heidegger decides to do a phenomenological investigation of humans in their average-everydayness which he calls 'Dasein' (translates as being there). The event of such existence is our 'Thrown-ness', no one is an autonomous individaul, free to choose their own way of existence. We belong to cultures and our behaviours derive from our social environment. Universal system do not account for different practices, thinking among various cultures. There can be no 'being there' if the world does not exist, Daisen and the world are the same. Rules for behaviours are all contingent elements of various cultures. Modes of existence are categorised by Heidegger as undifferentaited (does not question position in life), inauthentic (substitutes one type of life for another, anxiety, 'Fallen-ness') and the authentic mode of existence. That is, to take resposibility for the life you are living, realise that no-one is accountablefor it except you, you are a being-towards-death.

This recognition of meaninglessness has great consequences fo the individual. For Existentialists, we filter the world through language, in a manner similar to Kant's categories, which fosters a particular experience of the world. For Existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) 'existence preceeds essence', this is similar to Heidegger's insight that a person is first and foremost a product of the world. But for Sartre this means that humans have no 'pregiven nature'. While Heidegger thinks that the individual was merely a part of his environment. Satre draws an opposite conclusion, that the individual was an autonomous self. Heidegger thinks this is just another version of Descartes philosophy: a view which centres the world around the individual, he claims that his Daisen stands humble in relation to the world (which makes beings possible).

According to Heidegger it is incorrect to centre philosophy around one particular being and that this has caused the crisis of the modern world. Technology as a particular way of seeing the world and the entire world as 'stuff' for consumption. Heidergger's notion of 'Bestand' translates as 'stock' or 'standing reserve'. The abuses we commit against Nature arouse from this technological attitude and they derive from our self-centred world-view, the world exists to be used. Many of the world atrocities can be traced back to this supposedly harmless philosophy that we are individuals providing reference for the world.

Only by realising that humanity is one being among many and merely part of an all-encompassing Being ca we begin to live in harmony with the rest of the world. But technology keeps us from recognising Being. when we see the world with the lens of technology, we preclude the possibility of recognising the splendor of the world, of Being. How do we attaing such relationship with the world? How do we attain an attitude that is not technological? By recognising ourselves as Daisen and not the 'thinking thing'. We are all in a position to realise that certain social practices contrubute or not to that relationship. Language is a central preoccupation of Heidegger, specially Geeek. He criticiese the impoverishment of language when it should be the 'House of the Being', the living memory of our existence.

(my note: Heidegger's discourse seems very fruitful for an 'ecological' interpretation the world, and it can be used as argument to put restrains in the development of poor countries. The conservation of the Daisen can be used as an instrument of power, a reason to force developing countries to produce, for example, clean and expensive energy.)

Foucault for Beginners (Lydia A. Fillingham, 1993)

Lydia A. Fillingham. Foucault for Beginners. London and New York: Writers and Readers,1993.


Intro
Madness and Civilization
The Birth of the Clinic
The Order of Things
Discipline and Punish
The History of Sexuality

Subsequent to Sartre, contemporary of Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Barthes. Interested in Power and Knowledge and how they work together. The construction of Truth in human sciences are deciding matters that define humanity.On a more specialised level, all the human sciences (psycology, sociology, economics, linguistics, even medicine) define human beings at the same time as they describe them, and work together with such institutions as mental hospitals, prisions factories, schools, and law courts to have secific and serious effects on people.

Foucault studies the categorisation of people into normality and abnormality: Madness, Criminality, Peverted Sexuality, Illness. And he challenges these historical assumptions. Behaviours that got people locked up in hospital at one time was glorified in another. 18th century social sciences tried to regulate behavious by defining normal and abnormal conduct. In earlier times madmen were an accepted part of the community, sick people were treatred at home, disabled or disfigured people were not expected to stay out of sight and criminals were punished as publicly as possible.

Normality is defined in contrast with abnormality. The study of abnormality is one of the main ways power relations are established in society. Institutional power is like a mental police deciding what should and what shouldn't be allowed in society.

Fascination with Madness, Erasmus (Moriae Encomium, 1509) and King Lear (1605) both focus on the dangerous insights a madman may have. Including unemployed people, who you might think were victims of an economic problem, were going to jail in the 17th century as creators of a moral problem.

After the French Revolution, Madness was started to be seen as your own fault, your responsibility, and because other people were watching you, you learned to watch yourself. What good can someonetrained in medicine do to those who are no physically ill? Dissecation of the body comes into play. Death and disease change from purely negative ideas to crucial elements in the process of life.

In The Order of Things (Les Mots et les Choses) Foulcault starts by quoting a passage from JL Borges " a certain Chinese encyclopaedia divides the animals into ..." . The impossible collection of kinds of animals is so funny that it violates the sense of order. By means of the fable the exotic charm of another system of thought points to the limitation of ours. Foucault claimed man was a recent invention and that he might die.

In Discipline and Punish he moves away from Archaeology of Knowledge's structuralism. His interest in prision becomes an inquiry into the origins of prision as a form of punishment. In general his focus will now be the power relations, and how the seeming abstractions of discourse have very concrete material effects on people's bodies. Discipline, spatialisation, Minute control activity, Repetitive Exercises, Detailed Hierarchies, Normalising Judgements. The PANOPTICON (Jeremy Bentham) - the idea is that every person is isolated in a smal room, where they all may be observed at all times by a single person in the centre tower.

Foucault's abstract idea of power is objected by many scholars, particularly some historians. They insist we have to look for a localised 'agency' of power, who is exercising the power? where is the system of power? why are they doing it? However, historian seem to boil down to individual people doing things.

Foucault is not interested in indvidual power ot indvidual will. He would say that our society became an nomalising society, and individual rights becomes the alibi of power. For him there is no resistence outside the system, individual efforts to complain are seem as 'uncooperative behaviour' rather than political resistance.

Critics of Foucault mantain that his analysis of power is simply a dead end that disallows any possibility of political action. But Foucault insisted that political resistance was just not possible, but a necessary part of the equation. "You see, if there was no resistance, there would be no power relations, because it would be simply a matter of obedience. So resistance comes first and resistance remains superior to the forces of the process, power relations are obliged to change with resistance."