Seeable Relationship. Sayable connection. #02
This post is not organised writing or essay, but a fragmented thought.
Following my previous post, I believe it is worth continuing this discussion. While I am particularly interested in the moment when something becomes ‘seeable’ or in what happens immediately after a moment of affection (I suppose I should revisit Massumi on this), these ideas remain closely related to the question of what ‘seeing’ means in Foucault’s terms. What intrigues me, first of all, is Rajchman’s description of Foucault’s concept of seeing—not merely as visionary but as something embedded in doing. In the context of self-evidence, there are two forms of ‘doing’: participation and acceptance—both of which we can, in theory, 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” (Rajchman, Foucault, p. 94). But what exactly is a seer? Deleuze describes Foucault’s seer as someone who perceives unseen évidences—the conditions that render our actions acceptable or tolerable to us (Deleuze, 1986). In other words, Foucault reveals that self-evidence is not hidden but unseeable. Rather than providing a decisive answer, the seer renders the unseeable visible, transforming it into évidence. If I extend this connection further, I might suggest that the relationship itself—or the moment itself—could be an act of seeing, without the necessity of a subject. Foucault observed that historians’ vision shares similarities with fiction, in that both render unseen spaces visible. Their aim is not simply to show (faire voir) the invisible, but rather to demonstrate “the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible” (Foucault, Foucault/Blanchot, p. 24). Fiction thus maintains a deep kinship with space. This aligns with the broader goal of showing how things might be otherwise—how possibilities beyond self-evidence exist.
This leads me to another line of thought, which I will explore in my next post: what is the ‘clicking moment’ of realisation? Does realisation emerge from invisibility or from the unseen? And how does this relate to space and the power of space? Foucault extends his inquiry into the spatialisation of knowledge, moving beyond perceptual evidence grounded in inference, induction, or deduction. While modern Western scholars remain preoccupied with observation, knowledge is, in fact, constructed in a manner akin to that of fiction writers.
To clarify my understanding, this is not about validating philosophy or science but rather about the social construction of knowledge and space—up to the point where 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 ways in which spatialisation manifests, such as the “technology of the visual” in natural science—observatories, microscopes, cyclotrons—where experimentation plays a central role. This is not only the history of philosophy or science but also of fine art, where the validation of vision has played a crucial role. As machine vision has increasingly replaced human vision, the human eye has been repositioned within a new mode of spatialisation (I will explore this further later). Of course, this is also connected to the representation of language in the French tradition, where voir aligns with évidence (isn’t this also true for Deleuze, who reworks the concept through the French tradition?). Additionally, knowledge is conceived as spatialised content within the brain. Is this a lost space? A displacement?
Once again, the question arises: what is Foucault’s concept of spatialisation? What does he mean when he says that space makes knowledge seeable? And what exactly is Foucault’s apparatus? One of the essential conditions for the epistemological “thaw” of medicine at the end of the 18th century was the organisation of the hospital as an “examining apparatus.”
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 185.
- Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
- Rajchman, John, ‘Foucault’s Art of Seeing’, October, 44 (1988), 89–117 <https://doi.org/10.2307/778976>
- “An Interview with Gilles Deleuze,” History of the Present(Spring 1986), p. 1.
- Foucault, Michel, and Maurice Blanchot, Maurice Blanchot, the Thought from Outside (New York : Cambridge, Mass: Zone Books ; Distributed by the MIT Press, 1987), p. 24.
- Legg, Stephen, ‘Assemblage/Apparatus: Using Deleuze and Foucault’, Area, 43.2 (2011), 128–33
