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Knowledge of Place

Mark R. Wynn

in Faith and Place: An Essay in Embodied Religious Epistemology

This chapter reviews some of the recent literature in philosophy of place. Drawing on authors such as Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, Pierre Bourdieu, and David Seamon, the chapter deepens the ... More

This chapter reviews some of the recent literature in philosophy of place. Drawing on authors such as Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, Pierre Bourdieu, and David Seamon, the chapter deepens the earlier discussion of the nature of knowledge of place, by considering further the affect-infused character of knowledge of place and its connection to salient perception of a material context, and by examining the rootedness of knowledge of place in habitual bodily responses.Less

The Mathematical A Priori

David Webb

in Foucault's Archaeology: Science and Transformation

In The Order of Things, Foucault writes that the interest in formal languages opens up ‘the possibility, and the task, of applying a second critique of pure reason on the basis of new forms of the ... More

In The Order of Things, Foucault writes that the interest in formal languages opens up ‘the possibility, and the task, of applying a second critique of pure reason on the basis of new forms of the mathematical a priori’. My book argues that The Archaeology of Knowledge is intended to begin the work of such a critique, albeit one that is revealed as radically historical. This chapter traces the idea of a mathematical a priori back to Bachelard (who uses the expression) and Cavaillès.Less

Haunted Spaces and Monstrous Lairs

Jack Fennell

in Rough Beasts: The Monstrous in Irish Fiction, 1800-2000

Space is not merely an inert fact of nature, or a simple backdrop to history. It is, rather, a socially constructed set of meanings that are attached to the world around us – in place-names, in ... More

Space is not merely an inert fact of nature, or a simple backdrop to history. It is, rather, a socially constructed set of meanings that are attached to the world around us – in place-names, in stereotypes and values (e.g. ‘rough’ neighbourhoods and ‘desirable locations’), and the psychological resonances of different spatial concepts (e.g. the meanings suggested by ‘cottage,’ ‘mansion’ and ‘cave’). Supernatural antagonists contribute to these layers of meaning, producing haunted spaces and territories where trespassers meet gruesome ends. This chapter looks at the production of monstrous space in Irish literature, leaning particularly on Michel Foucault’s understanding of the ‘heterotopia’ (a space of crisis, containing that which cannot be spatially ordered according to the dominant ideology of the society that produces them), and Gaston Bachelard’s categorisation of fear into ‘Fear in the Attic’ (transitory, insubstantial) and ‘Fear in the Cellar’ (enduring, resistant to rationalisation).Less

And Jesus Wept … Poetry in a Time of Terror! Agha Shahid Ali

Hoshang Merchant

in Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant

The poem is from Shahid Ali’s last book Rooms Are Never Finished (2002). It compares Ali’s family troubles to the troubles of Karbala. Ali’s mother is compared to Hussein’s sister Zainab. Ali himself ... More

The poem is from Shahid Ali’s last book Rooms Are Never Finished (2002). It compares Ali’s family troubles to the troubles of Karbala. Ali’s mother is compared to Hussein’s sister Zainab. Ali himself is, of course, the martyr Hussein on losing his mother. Both mother and son died of brain tumour. The imagery of God here is that of a thief, that is, child Krishna as butter thief. There is the imagery of darkness and light, for example, the last dying light of the ICU machine. Also, lights at Delhi airport when the body of Ali’s mother body is brought from Amherst. Gaston Bachelard’s trope of mother as motherland and foreign country as mistress is used. Father recites Hafiz on Love.Less

Gaston Bachelard: Construction and Temporal Discontinuity

David Webb

in Foucault's Archaeology: Science and Transformation

For Bachelard, science is not the direct formalisation of experience, but the modification of the conditions of existing experience. The laws that give form even to phenomena as they present ... More

For Bachelard, science is not the direct formalisation of experience, but the modification of the conditions of existing experience. The laws that give form even to phenomena as they present themselves at a given moment (so leaving aside future innovations in science) are therefore not to be drawn from empirical experience. Instead, one has to look for rational laws found at the level of what Bachelard calls a ‘noumenology’. significantly, he calls these laws the ‘mathematical a priori’, a phrase that Foucault will later use towards the end of The Order of Things in recommending a new critical philosophy. What Bachelard took from mathematical science and passed on to others, including Foucault, is that what for Kant were transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience, and for the forms of judgement appropriate to it, have been removed from consciousness and laid out in the practice of mathematics. The chapter then outlines Bachelard's conception of temporal discontinuity (a form of temporal atomism modified by what he called the arithmetisation of time), which will also be important for understanding the sense of temporal dispersion Foucault deploys in The Archaeology of Knowledge.Less

Introduction

David Webb

in Foucault's Archaeology: Science and Transformation

A commentary on the Introduction to Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge.

Harmony Street: An Interstitial House

John P. Klingman

in Sweet Spots: In-Between Spaces in New Orleans

This is a descriptive analysis of a historic New Orleans Garden District house by its owner, an architect who has embraced the idiosyncratic aspects of the house while designing ways of enhancing ... More

This is a descriptive analysis of a historic New Orleans Garden District house by its owner, an architect who has embraced the idiosyncratic aspects of the house while designing ways of enhancing them. The chapter’s vantage point is lived and imagined experience, in the manner of Gaston Bachelard, focused upon the concept of dwelling. Perhaps most radically, the chapter describes the potential for and advantages of thermal comfort in warm weather, using passive cooling and other design modifications, while eschewing mechanical air conditioning.Less

Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhythm

Michael Gallope

in Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable

Chapter 4 focuses on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. These thinkers show themselves to be as Bergsonian as Jankélévitch in conceiving of music as containing an intimate link with the flow of ... More

Chapter 4 focuses on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. These thinkers show themselves to be as Bergsonian as Jankélévitch in conceiving of music as containing an intimate link with the flow of lived time. But they develop this idea in a new direction by proposing that music is not simply an inconsistent flux but, rather, is in line with Bachelard’s critique of Bergsonism, a punctuated flow that is coextensive with the cosmic powers of social and creaturely life. Moreover, due to their contention that “being is univocal” and that an artwork is a “sensation in itself,” they contend that music is part of the same pluralized substance as language. Crucially, they nod to the ineffable in practical terms when they state that it is “hard to say” what music does in relationship to language. But on a philosophical level, their ontological joining of music and language in something of a Mobius strip represents a remarkable shift that sets Bloch, Adorno, and Jankélévitch powerfully into relief. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is no mysterious depth or “unrepresentable” aspect to music’s sensuous power by comparison with language; music is merely a sonic extension of a cosmic rhythm of lived forces.Less

The Discursive Regularities

David Webb

in Foucault's Archaeology: Science and Transformation

A commentary on Part II of Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge. This includes the following chapters: 1. The Unities of Discourse 2. Discursive Formations 3. The Formation of Objects 4. The ... More

A commentary on Part II of Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge. This includes the following chapters: 1. The Unities of Discourse 2. Discursive Formations 3. The Formation of Objects 4. The Formation of Enunciative Modalities 5. The Formation of Concepts 6. The Formation of Strategies 7. Remarks and ConsequencesLess

The Statement and the Archive

David Webb

in Foucault's Archaeology: Science and Transformation

A commentary on Part III of Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge. This includes the following chapters: 1. Defining the Statement 2. The Enunciative Function 3. The Description of Statements 4. ... More

A commentary on Part III of Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge. This includes the following chapters: 1. Defining the Statement 2. The Enunciative Function 3. The Description of Statements 4. Rarity, Exteriority, Accumulation 5. The Historical A Priori and the ArchiveLess

Conclusion

David Webb

in Foucault's Archaeology: Science and Transformation

A commentary on Part V of Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge, which is the Conclusion to his book.

Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye

Susan Fraiman

in Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins

Defines and illustrates the concept of “shelter writing”: a mode of slow, step-by-step description, cherishing the actions of homemaking in the aftermath of domestic dislocation. Offers the ... More

Defines and illustrates the concept of “shelter writing”: a mode of slow, step-by-step description, cherishing the actions of homemaking in the aftermath of domestic dislocation. Offers the paradigmatic example of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), focuses on Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993), and closes by touching on the reality TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Establishes the logic of hyper-investment in homemaking as compensation for domestic deprivation or difficulty. Calls on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space for his notion of the “felicitous house,” while also placing more emphasis than Bachelard on the reality of domestic labor.Less

Introduction

Martin Shuster

in New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre

The introduction to New Television situates television shows from Twin Peaks onwards amidst other aesthetic developments, both with the medium of television and beyond. It pushes back against almost ... More

The introduction to New Television situates television shows from Twin Peaks onwards amidst other aesthetic developments, both with the medium of television and beyond. It pushes back against almost all of the dominant ways in which these shows have been understood (which often makes the shows subservient to some other quality, say, “cinema” or “complexity”) and tries to understand them on their own terms. To do this, it places analysis or criticism of them into traditions of ordinary language philosophy, where the focus is on understanding one’s experience (traditions exemplified here above all by Stanley Cavell). The introduction presents an understanding of the genre of ‘new television’ as a genre that explores the novelty of human life, especially as it emerges from and serves as a commentary on a world that is presented as otherwise devoid of any normative authority. The introduction concludes with a phenomenological consideration of the significance of a genre bound up with the television medium, that is with something that is fundamentally made to be screened in the home.Less

Writing, Naturally

Michael Jackson

in The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing

What phenomenology asks of us is that we cultivate, as best we can, a disinterested attitude toward the world, such that it may be seen from a standpoint other than our own, and thereby continually ... More

What phenomenology asks of us is that we cultivate, as best we can, a disinterested attitude toward the world, such that it may be seen from a standpoint other than our own, and thereby continually seen anew.Writing creates connections, not knowledge.Less

The Performativity Of Economic Models: Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part II and Philip Massinger's The Picture

Bradley D. Ryner

in Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing 1600-1642

This concluding chapter asks what the ‘mercantile dramaturgy’ outlined in the book can tell us about the performativity of economic discourse itself, about the degree to which economic models ... More

This concluding chapter asks what the ‘mercantile dramaturgy’ outlined in the book can tell us about the performativity of economic discourse itself, about the degree to which economic models actively shape the world they represent. For a twenty-first-century audience or readership, mercantile dramaturgy can be most beneficial in pointing towards a performative understanding of the reciprocal creation of ‘economics’ and ‘the economy’. The chapter argues that the mercantile dramaturgy of Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part II and Philip Massinger's The Picture returns an awareness of mediation to the idealised models of mercantile treatises. Both plays engage with the problems of knowing about and intervening in events that occur at great distances via ‘the factor’, who serves as a figure of mediating agency, whose work is effaced when mercantile treatises promise an unmediated view of economic systems. These plays present economic models as the products of work which are themselves able to perform work. They show us not only that, in the phrase of Gaston Bachelard popularised by Bruno Latour, les faits sont faits (facts are manufactured), but also that facts are factors -- mediators that exert their own agency.Less

The Violence of the Supermax: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics of Prison Space

Adrian Switzer

in Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration

This chapter addresses the problem of violence in Supermax prisons from a dual phenomenological and aesthetic perspective. A review of the sociological evidence on the relationship between ... More

This chapter addresses the problem of violence in Supermax prisons from a dual phenomenological and aesthetic perspective. A review of the sociological evidence on the relationship between maximum-security prisons and violence reveals several inconsistencies: a facility originally designed and built in the name of reducing prison violence instead has been a site of persistent and increased violence. Prompted by the incongruities in the empirical evidence on Supermax violence and by the sense that those incongruities stem from the assumption that prison violence is a matter of prisoner violence, the chapter approaches the problem from a transcendental phenomenological perspective. By working through Husserl's remarks on space and spatiality, and by appealing to Bachelard's Poetics of Space, it argues that there is a basic “mode” to space-in-itself, namely, a hostility that constitutes from a nonsubjective perspective the inhospitability of the bare spaces of the Supermax prison. The chapter concludes with an aesthetic supplement that shows the “hostility” of bare space in a way that a theoretical phenomenology, even at its best, can merely state.Less

Philopoetic Somnambulism: An Imaginary Freedom

Kyoo Lee

in Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad

Following the narrative order and drive of the First Meditation, this stage of reading pushes that “touch of madness” further, and frame the “threefold” dream of Descartes, the progenitor of ... More

Following the narrative order and drive of the First Meditation, this stage of reading pushes that “touch of madness” further, and frame the “threefold” dream of Descartes, the progenitor of philosophical modernity of the West in terms of “a touch of imagination”: Private, Theoretical and Theological. The task here is to articulate the autobiographical, narratological and surreal liminality between waking time and dreaming time as a twofold matrix of modernity; the analysis explores the material affectivity of Cartesian dream in terms of the Bachelardian thinking “matter” that dreams. Two points of contention are to be established, in view of the material performativity of Cartesian dream-reflection. First, the famous dream “argument” can be and is to be read as not simply as the illustrated defence of the epistemological zero-point but a poetics of risks; such an experience, along with the subsequent account, is integral to Descartes's philosophical project as a whole. Second, so is, by extension, the tactile metaphor of the Cartesian imagination and “hand-holding” guide to truth.Less

Cornered Reflection: With and around an Evil Genius

Kyoo Lee

in Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad

Focusing on Descartes’ strategy of fusing logical reasoning and figural thinking, this last chapter phenomenologizes the evil genius “argument” narratively. We see how and why the issue of the ... More

Focusing on Descartes’ strategy of fusing logical reasoning and figural thinking, this last chapter phenomenologizes the evil genius “argument” narratively. We see how and why the issue of the topographical virtuality of the Cartesian thinker, along with the persistent, referential ambiguity and circularity of “God,” becomes mutually pressing, remaining unresolved in the moral teleology of Cartesian “faith.” The Cartesian narrator’s “zero-point” is then self-cornering or “cornered” (Bachelard). By implication, Cartesian reflection is forced to become inventive, insofar as it seeks to point beyond that which is ultimately thinkable. The new order of alterity re-established by this ambiguated time—time pushed to the edge of, and outside, time that instantly falls/fold back into the heart of time—becomes devoid of any content, without “inventory” (Bruns). Such is how the Cartesian mind’s representational capacity becomes a purely positional fiction. Given that the Cartesian Good is God and vice versa by (co)extension, the reciprocity of which is conceptual rather than referential, the allegorical fate of Cartesian self-reflection rests on the ambiguous non-linearity or complexity—chaotic condition (Nancy), extractive resistance (Badiou) and responsorial position (Levinas)—of the reflective subject; almost eternalized therein would be the dramatic tension itself, which remains nameless or overnamed.Less

Welcome to the Rhizosphere

Christy Wampole

in Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor

This chapter outlines the ways in which the root has been imagined as an archetypal image. In Hans Blumenberg’s terms, the root metaphor is an absolute metaphor, given that he uses it in his very ... More

This chapter outlines the ways in which the root has been imagined as an archetypal image. In Hans Blumenberg’s terms, the root metaphor is an absolute metaphor, given that he uses it in his very definition of metaphorology. The root works as a kind of super metaphor in that it subsumes the most compelling aspects of the three other primary metaphors for origin: the foundation, the source, and the seed. Jung and Bachelard have shown that the root is a powerful figure for home, the past, death, memory, and the mother. More importantly, this chapter shows that it is a figure for the subconscious itself. The search for origins implied in root-seeking often projects a logic of filiation onto non-biological phenomena, which leads to many false applications and excessive generalizations in the realm of politics.Less