Engo’s Introduction

He attempted to set down a thought. It appeared that Foucault’s persistence in quoting from the legal reformers indicated something, a powerful trait, an inhabitation of the matter at hand. At the same time Foucault never ceases to be Foucault; one sees turns of speech pregnant with irony, usages of the legal discourse not far short of satire. If you sight the traces of method, you will shudder with joy. Ecstasy verges and urges on primordial zeal. But which one. Is Foucault a prophet, and if so, of what sect. How sit within the penal colony, don the lineaments of the warden, and retain a voice tonally intact. Or, how diverge from that tone and remember the scale back. How represent the representation and still remain present. See the following.

Main Subject

Foucault has mastered assimilation - he has taken in the language of the Structural One. He has studied its logic, its history, its means of arriving at the present status. This allows him to speak with its words, allude to its insights, as if they were his own - all the while keeping autonomous to some degree, maintaining an interrogatory voice within the logos.

If we do not wish to say that this constitutes Foucault’s authenticity (that would indicate an original autonomy to which one ought to return, to which one’s ‘ontological’ imperative directs one), then we should at least say this is his genius. To be within and still to see it all.

What this means is that Foucault keeps sight of what he is doing, whose points he is making: he keeps an eye on the discursive flows emanating from the pen. What eye is this? In any event it is not the I. He becomes a speaking-through, but under a guidance - he has something to tell us, but it will not be him that reveals the story. Every time he points, he uses another’s hand; and like the webbing of fingers, the pointing always finds that which is conjoined, phenomena con-sensed. Many colors, many tongues; the eloquent production of a synaesthetic polyvocity.

But who oversees? Well for one we have a revision: overseer, not overman. If we must bear the heritage of industrial revolution, let us not despair of our bondage to the factory. Let us be a transparent managerial prism. A prism that inflects, connects, divulges, underscores, revisits, duplicates - but does not judge. A prism that sees.

I verge on a discredited thought. What I meant to say was this: Foucault has an intention. He is the nerve structure around the eye. He is that which stakes energy in the seeing, the compiler of good tidings. Again I misspeak. I wish to move us towards a new cross-discipline, and what a term that is, in a Foucauldian exegesis! I want us to see why Foucault is a sort of visionary, and why we already see that. Foucault has an intention. He is in tension. He is intent. In a tent. Camped in sentence. The sentence being served. Sent to dispel tense. Tends to misspell sens. Sent; no. Sen–tence-sen–tense-sen. Sen. Ssen. Sssen. Ssssssssssssssssssssszen.

Absinth’s Verse

Once men met at random

now they are divided by disposition

and observed

for the potentiality

of danger

lies hidden

in the smallest

most everyday matters