Seeable Relationship. Sayable connection. #02

Il Sun Moon

• 3 min read

This post is not organised writing or essay, but a fragmented thought.

#01

From the last posting, I think it is worth continuing the topic. Although I am interested in the topic of the moment of becoming ‘seeable’ or the after a moment of affection (I guess I should read Massumi again), it is still related to what is ‘seeing’ in Foucault’s term

First of all, what intrigues me is when Rajchman describe that Foucault’s seeing is not only visionary but is part of doing. There are two ‘doing’ in self-evidence prison, a participation or acceptance we can refuse. In Foucault’s idiom, évidence is related to the acceptability of a practice. “It is to try to see how we might act on what cannot yet be seen in what we do. It is, in short, a “critical” art, and it is in exercising it that Foucault would be, in Deleuze’s term, a seer or voyant (p. 94).” Then, what is the seer? Deleuze explained Foucault’s seer as a someone who seeing unseen évidneces that makes things we do acceptable or tolerable to us (Deleuze, 1986). In other word, Foucault opens up the conversation that unseen self-evidence, which is not hidden but unseeable. Rather deliver decisive answer but, a seer that make unseeable to seeable êvidnece. If I can connect with this relationship, I may say relationship itself, or the moment itself can be an act of seer with out subject.

Foucault found the similarity of the historians’ eye to the fiction’s making visible the unseen space of seeing, making visible unseen manifest.

not to show (faire voir) the invisible, but to show the extent to which the invisibility of visible is invisible. Hence [fiction] bears a profound kinship with space. . . .

Foucault/Blanchot, New York, Zone Books, 1987, p. 24.

The similar aim which showing how things might be otherwise, beyond our self-evidences, other possibilities in life (I would like to connect this in the next post about the ‘clicking moment of the realisation’; what is realisation? is it from the invisibility? or unseen? and the second question would be the relationship with the space or the power of the space). Furthermore, Foucault continues to the ‘spatialisation’ of knowledge, rather than perceptual evidence through a logic of inference, inductive or deductive, as modern western scholars are obsessed with observation, the knowledge, in fact, constructed as fiction writers.

Here, I should make clear about my understanding, that it is not about the validation of the philosophy or the science, but the social construction of the knowledge and the space, until the eye no longer deciphers the “prose of the world,” and where, therefore, “the eye was … destined to see and only see, and the ear to hear and only hear (Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 43.). There are many way of the “modes of spatialisation,” such as Natural science’s “technology of the visual”: observatories, microscopes, cyclotrons. And experimentation is central to them. This is not only the history of the philosophy or science, but in the fine art, where validation of the eye had been playing main role. While machinery vision replaced human vision, human eyes had located in new way of spatialisation(let’s keep talking about this later.) Of course, both related representation of the language in theFrench idea which voir with évidence(isn’t it same for Deleuze? Folding the idea from the french), and the knowledge as a spatialised contents in the brain. Is it lost space? displace? Here, again question is what is Foucault’s ‘spatialisation?‘ what does it means when he said space makes knowledge seeable? what’s Foucault’s apparatus?

One of the essential conditions for the epistemological “thaw” of medicine at the end of the 18th century was the organization of the hospital as an “examining apparatus.”

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 185.