[Framework Post] Week 1A: Reading, Writing and Doing Theory.

When Gilles Deleuze credits Michel Foucault for undermining the “the indignity of speaking for others” (209), they touch on a very important problem faced in our postmodern condition. This condition centres on the revision of a long process of a production of knowledge governed by the white heterosexual Anglo-Saxon male. Various post-structuralist theories are up in arms to prove that these traditional bodies of knowledge about everything from architecture, politics to philosophy have been camouflaged in a way that whilst we use them in our utterance, they are not so much our words by foreign bodies falsely naturalised into our systems.

Often, such body of knowledge are masked in what we believe to be the very epitome of neutrality, high rationality inarguable by anyone capable of thought: Theory.

Whilst it seems clearer to us now that various theories about the world being flat and the rest treatment for post-natal women have proven false and inaccurate, the very idea that theory is conjured on a platonic plane of abstract rationality entices one to believe its veracity given the suitable realignment of thought. What is not made explicit, however, is that the act of theorising is in itself a “practice” (208), as Foucault proposes. And as any rules of governing the institution of practice, there are conventions, rules and axioms that become rules of a game that one has to abide before entry into the practice is permitted. And there are different games, each accompanied by a slight shift in the set of rules and conventions; or as Deleuze quotes Proust, “glasses” with varied focuses. To me, it is almost a platter of religions from which one may decide to devote hir life.

What really interests me is if theories are inevitably capable of uniting people or in fact aim towards attaining that ever ambiguous concept of world peace? Or have all theories discarded the previously well-regarded aspiration of unifying lives, preferring to settle in our postmodern sentiment that the very concepts of world peace, perfection, et al are but utopian spectres—variably conceived depending on space-time continuums—that we would always be only working towards as a process, and not as an end.



References:

1. Deleuze, Gilles, and Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. trans Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Ithaca. New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. 205-217.