Foucault VS Lewis (a fragment of a discussion on meaning)

Foucault: It is all very well for you. Claiming the origin at the back of all discourse. What benefits you receive! What power! But I am full of doubts, and you are full of ignorance. Perhaps your Origin does exist, but it makes no difference whether He does or not. I don't think you've got the idea of the rind: the thick outer skin of derivatives and endless dispersions which we call (in each turn) "truth". Picture reality as an infinite globe with this very thick crust on the outside. Its thickness is a thickness of words. Words endlessly refracted and repulsed by each other, splintering forth into a thousand possibilities, potentialities infinite and vast! We are born under the surface. Under the text. Piling more and more over our heads. If your Origin exists, He's not in the globe. He's outside, like a moon

Lewis: Even if that were true, my friend, He did not stay there. He was made flesh and dwelt among us.

Foucault: So you say, and claim it to be the central happening of all that happens. But can you not see that it is merely another displacement? Another dispersion? The Origin cannot survive the derivatives, for they are parricidal to the core.

Lewis: Indeed they are, and were.

Foucault: I see what you're thinking, but it is all folly. There is no central happening of all happenings. There is no center, no tyrannical focal point for the discursive field, but millions and millions of discourses with their own centers, leading either nowhere or (what is better) to more and more "centers" for ever. I defy your God! I defy him with all the power of words and empty spaces and repetitions and dispersions and make Him bow down before bigness. How can you claim that there is a center for all the universe? You were born years ago and it is from old, and most of it is dead space were you cannot live or think or speak your private truth-to-power. Look at it all unblinkingly and you will see that there is no center. No Origin living or dead or resurrected. No plan or meaning or summation of the discursive play. As soon as you think you see one, it melts away into nothing, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea; or else it mutates into some other plan that you never dreamed of, and what was the center becomes the rim. Thus I doubt if any shape or plan or pattern was anything more than a trick of your own eyes, cheated with a hope informed by a panoptic force outside of and shaping your fragmented self. I ask you: to what is all this spiraling nothingness driving? What is the morning you speak of? What is this Incarnation of the Origin to be the beginning of?

Lewis: The beginning of the Great Dance, though we do not talk of it "beginning". It does not wait to be perfect until all is gathered into it. We do not speak of when it will "begin". It has begun from before always. There was no time when all things did not rejoice before His face as now. The dance that we dance is at the center, and for the dance all things were made.

You would add words to words in lumpish aggregation, or discourses to discourses and dispersions to dispersions, but you shall never come near His greatness. Times without number He has circled the world while we were not alive, and those times were not desert. His own voice was in them, speaking His infinite Word, which dwells (all of Him dwells) within the word of the smallest discourse and is not cramped; the entire discursive field of play is inside the Word who is inside all words and it does not distend Him. They are also at the center. We are not the voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where we cannot come. Where there is, there is the Word of the Origin, speaking life into every hollow void, filling all ontos like blood fills a wound.

Each word is at the center, with all terms and categories. The discourses are at the center, with every dispersion they create. The field of play is at the center. The fragments of every soul are at the center. Where the Word of Origin is, there is the center. He is in every place. Not some of Him in one place and some in another, but in each place the whole God, even in the smallness beyond thought. Each thing was made for Him and by Him and lives and moves and has its being in Him, and He is the center. You say there is no way out of the text? I say there is no way out of the center, save into the Bent Will which casts itself into the Nowhere.

All this seems planless to your darkened mind, because there are more plans than you looked for. But in the plan of the Great Dance, plans and discourses and dispersions without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else is directed. All that is or was or is spoken or will be spoken is but a spark shed from the fire that is the endless utterances of the Word of the Origin, and no mouth can gainsay it. There seems no plan because it is all plan. There seems no center because it is all center, and within that still point the field plays on.

-Jon Vowell, et. al. (c) 2013

Wriggling in the Crushing Grip of Reason (an aside by Bill Watterson)

I could spend an entire blog post explaining Foucault's fragmentary, decentered view of history, its insidiousness, and how it breaks down under its own weight. Or I could just let Mr. Watterson explain it in far greater fashion than I ever could:

Foucault VS Sayers (with apologies to G.K. Chesterton)

Foucault: I thought that I hated everything more than common men hate anything. But I find that I do not hate everything as much as I hate God.

Sayers: God never hated you.

Foucault: He never hated because He never lived! I know what He is, all of Him, from first to last: He is the people in power! He is the police, the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! He is the Law, and He has never been broken. But is there not a free soul alive that does not long to break Him, for no other reason than that He has never been broken? We who are in revolt talk all kind of nonsense about this or that crime of Government. It is all folly! The only crime of Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse Him for being cruel. I do not curse Him (though I might) for being kind. I curse Him for being safe! He sits in His chair of stone and has never come down from it. He is the Lord of angel armies, the one who knows the dwelling place of light and has seen the gates of deep darkness, and He has had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive You for everything, You who rule mankind, if I could feel for once that You have suffered for one hour of real agony like I have!

Sayers: I see everything now, including your error and your pain. It is good that you give glory to smallness, to the individual threads of the tapestry. But to say that the tapestry is ignorant of the threads and therefore the two are at odds? It is all a lie! Greatness knows all, including smallness; that is what makes it great. It has touched the heavens and the dirt. It has bent the knee. It has felt the plow and the whip and the horrible boot of the oppressor upon its back. That is the great truth of the Incarnation, which is not just a pious commonplace. It is not commonplace at all. What it means (among other things) is that for whatever reasons God chose to make man as he is---limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death---He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace, and He thought it all worthwhile, if for no other reason than that the real lie of Satan may be thrown back in your face! God has earned the right to say, "You lie!" For it is not true that He has never been broken; He was broken on the cross. It is not true that He has never descended from His throne; He has descended into hell. He too has suffered, beyond any man alive, for none have nor ever can drink of the cup that He drank for us all.

-Jon Vowell, et. al. (c) 2012

Foucault VS St. Paul (a fragment of a debate on freedom)

Foucault: But can you not see that all discursive formulations hide plays at power? Truth is the illusion that we give to control, and control is the contrivance that we give to oppression so that it may claim objectivity. And every claim or call to "objectivity" (so-called) is merely an attempt to draw the living, fragile, pulsating interplay of all phenomena around a single center. That is the very architecture of tyranny: when the immobility of structures inhibit and demarcate the living openness of life, when closed systems attempt to silence and banish the existence and voice of differences and negations. This must end if we are to know the true, dark freedom of our "selves" (so-called). We must suppress the suppressors and subvert their narratives: narratives of race and gender and class, narratives used as the grindstones of patriarchs and imperialists to efface all peoples and press them into prescribed molds. We must take the hammer of discursive analysis, ever skeptical and critical, and free the world from its subjection to transcendence, its reduction to teleology, and its imprisonment to totalization. We must break down, tear down, inact a willful and purposeful fragmentation whose operation is an endless decentering that leaves no privilege to any center or origin. Only in this, this dispersion and scattering, this transgression of all boundaries, can we hope to find final liberation.

St. Paul: And who told you thus? To what wisdom did you learn such foolishness? To what law did you submit to that told you of the annulment of any and all law? Can you not see that your counsel is darkened with words that lack knowledge? For if you had read the scriptures, or if you knew the power of God, or even if you had properly read the great pagan Plato, then you would have known the truth. You would have known that tyranny cannot be answered by either democracy or anarchy but only monarchy. Wise, benevolent monarchy, ruled by a king who truly knows better than you and who truly seeks your good. And I say to you that there is such a king alive today. A King of kings who is all-Wisdom and all-Goodness, for He is those things and will always be those things, for He was those things even before the foundation of the world and all its imperfect discourses. His name is Jesus, and His title is Christ, and it is in His Lordship and our subjection to it that all oppression fails and our sad divisions cease. For in Him there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. In Him there is neither elitism nor populism, nor racism (from any race), sexism (from either sex), or classism (from any class), for all have found their identity in the objectivity and reality of His preeminence. All are equal when all bow at the name of Jesus. All voices are heard when every tongue confesses that Christ is Lord. Unhappy creature! There is no peace nor love nor joy nor hope in tearing all things down into fragments. Such deconstruction is merely destruction, the way of the Destroyer. But the way of Christ is creation, a building up of a living, unified body of many members into His real, objective, absolute, and essential headship. There is no other way under heaven whereby men can be saved or set free.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

 

21st Century Parents (a video by an orthodox rebel)

How Foucault has ruined parenting:

GoAnimate.com: 21st Century Parents by jonv4eyes

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012