I am a father. I have been a father now for almost 16 months. The amount of joy and happiness my daughter Eliana has brought to my life is extremely hard to explain, because it is different than most other kind of joys I have felt before.
But my daughter has not only brought novel joy to my life - she has also become two eyes, from which I can look upon the world. I see the world anew in her. I see the world anew through her, because I am displaced by her. When she was born, a cry echoed throughout the room. A cry that I did not create, and an echo that I could not control. I was a bystander to the birth of my child. Not a creator, not a maker - a bystander. My daughter is of me, but not myself. This fact is still after all of these months incomprehensible for me. I and my wife made her, but I can take no credit for how she has developed. I have no idea how and why she grows, walks and lives.
If I were to press a button to make airplane engines start and prepare everything for take-off, I would know that there were men who put much thought into the construction of the airplane and who designed everything minutely. If I were to stand at the top of the Cologne Cathedral, I would know that men have spent decades and even centuries creating this mother of all cathedrals. But when I feed my daughter and watch her walk around, there is no origin and source to be so easily found. There is a wonderful homeric line in the Odyssey: “Who, on his own, has ever really known who gave him life?” Neither the father nor the child can answer this question.
Let me turn now to a more academic framework. What I have found myself wondering more specifically is, how does my child match the structuralist/post-structuralist theories I have learned.
Foucault believes that we are enveloped by discourses that structure our encounter with the world, society and even our own selves. Nothing is immediately experienced by us. Everything is mediated by structured discourses that are part of a larger "episteme." And in turn this episteme is a semantic system that endows everything with meaning. Foucault believes "that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality" (taken from the article "Orders of Discourse"). These procedures are laboriously outlined in his work Archaeology of Knowledge.
But watching my child grow up I have noticed some simply human traits that cut across much of Foucault's theoretical tenets. When my daughter is angry, she frowns and yells and cries. When she is scared she runs and jumps and quivers. She can be disappointed and start to cry. When she sneezes, she smiles because it feels good. When she wants a cookie, she drops her chin a little bit and asks in her most gentle tone. I could continue, but you get the idea. Now the platonic Ghost that always obtrudes philosophical thought would counter my monologue by asking:
But my daughter has not only brought novel joy to my life - she has also become two eyes, from which I can look upon the world. I see the world anew in her. I see the world anew through her, because I am displaced by her. When she was born, a cry echoed throughout the room. A cry that I did not create, and an echo that I could not control. I was a bystander to the birth of my child. Not a creator, not a maker - a bystander. My daughter is of me, but not myself. This fact is still after all of these months incomprehensible for me. I and my wife made her, but I can take no credit for how she has developed. I have no idea how and why she grows, walks and lives.
If I were to press a button to make airplane engines start and prepare everything for take-off, I would know that there were men who put much thought into the construction of the airplane and who designed everything minutely. If I were to stand at the top of the Cologne Cathedral, I would know that men have spent decades and even centuries creating this mother of all cathedrals. But when I feed my daughter and watch her walk around, there is no origin and source to be so easily found. There is a wonderful homeric line in the Odyssey: “Who, on his own, has ever really known who gave him life?” Neither the father nor the child can answer this question.
Let me turn now to a more academic framework. What I have found myself wondering more specifically is, how does my child match the structuralist/post-structuralist theories I have learned.
Foucault believes that we are enveloped by discourses that structure our encounter with the world, society and even our own selves. Nothing is immediately experienced by us. Everything is mediated by structured discourses that are part of a larger "episteme." And in turn this episteme is a semantic system that endows everything with meaning. Foucault believes "that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality" (taken from the article "Orders of Discourse"). These procedures are laboriously outlined in his work Archaeology of Knowledge.
But watching my child grow up I have noticed some simply human traits that cut across much of Foucault's theoretical tenets. When my daughter is angry, she frowns and yells and cries. When she is scared she runs and jumps and quivers. She can be disappointed and start to cry. When she sneezes, she smiles because it feels good. When she wants a cookie, she drops her chin a little bit and asks in her most gentle tone. I could continue, but you get the idea. Now the platonic Ghost that always obtrudes philosophical thought would counter my monologue by asking:
Platonic Ghost: Banal! All of this is banal! This has nothing to do with Foucault and his theories. A baby pooping into her diapers and begging for a cookie won't make me change my mind about how our societies work!
To which I reply, with a calm and cheerful voice, imitating Socrates phony humility.
Timothy: Well my friend. You are right. My thoughts are very simple and - well, yes banal. But I do not know how else to express what I am getting at. I am sure you could help us in our search for the right terms. What I believe I want to express is how I see a mysteriously human trait in my daughter. Human, merely human - but beyond any discursive structures. She seems to have desires and wishes that cannot be mediated by a host of discourses. These human desires seem to have a mysterious deep source in and of itself.
Platonic Ghost: You are a fool, Timothy! You are trying to solve a paradox, but in fact are doing something that Spivak has termed the "epistemic violence." You forgot that nothing is outside discourses. Or, spoken with Derrida: "There is no outside-text." How then do you think you can look beyond discourses and see untouched and epistemologically unmediated? Everything you see is a discourse in itself. If you believe to see something purely, wonderfully, mysteriously human in your daughter, well, surprise: so do millions of other humans. It's its own discourse! Welcome to the "wow-I'm-a-parent-discourse" and get over it. Man is a "recent invention" as Foucault has said; he is "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" that might soon be erased by the next great wave.
Timothy: Compelling. But not satisfying. You yourself are creating your own paradox; your own vicious circle. If you believe that nothing is outside of discourses, than how can you claim that this truth is not itself a discourse? How can you get out of what one cannot get out of. You blame me of obliviously tapping into a "parent-discourse," but can I not just as easily blame you of tapping into a "discourse-discourse?" If there is no outside of discourses, how did you reach the point of knowledge of discourses? No - there must be something inherently human to humans. And my daughter is the example - pars pro toto. There is something inherently human that is paradoxically beyond the reach of humans. It is beyond the reach of discourses. Man is not the "face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." Man is the one who is looking onto the face drawn in sand; a face that he has drawn of himself.
1 comment:
When I was reading the part when you do a brief portrait of your daughter, I was simultaneously getting at what you hint at, I think, and worrying about the very fact that you are using language to express that. In a way I was both Timothy and the Ghost at this moment. Only difference is that I am thinking of language and you discourse. It seems silly to challenge the authority of language, as I am using it to challenge it. But I think T.S. Eliot, a great warrior against language, says something profound: When I am talking to you, I have to use language. (my paraphrase) You had your moment of revelation, which I bet is beyond language. Yet when you try to deliver it to us, you are forced into language, fighting language, yet letting it shape your thought to a degree.
The wonderful thing is, language can be mastered to resist the tyranny of discourse. I have in mind now, Wordsworth's "spots of time." Many of the spots of time, feature a visionary dreariness. It's hard to assign meaning to any of them without making it no longer Wordsworth (Wordsworthian language degeneraes into Foucaultian discourses). Spots of time has the power of lifting our spirit when it falls in the daily round of intercourse, i.e., the whole of involvements, of being-with. The power, if you allow me to turn Wordsworthian language into Heideggerian concepts (they are, I believe, not so far away from each other), lies in its clearing of the significances associated with sign and the whole of involvements. After the clearing, the human finds its being-together-with-nature. This solitary being-together-with-nature, a state of being beyond the structure of being in Heidegger's Being and Time, is something in humanity that works almost like inhumanity that cuts through the various fibers and tenets of both Heidegger's being-with and Foucault's discourse cobweb. When you have a wordsworthian moment,like the moment you watch tenderly over your daughter, who's from nature, you know the language that conveys it conveys something beyond itself. The society can surely appropriate the Wordsworthian language into discourses, or simply ignores it, but that does not mean it is not true, or does not exist.
Finally, I’d like to say that your love for your daughter, which the ghost would like to appropriate as “parent-discourse” is precisely the source of power that enables you to disclose what you have disclosed. It is usually when we devote ourselves to certain being, our children, a flower, a lake, that our attachment with it strengthened, together with heightened sense and imagination. When I see the moment you look upon your daughter with such tender love and wonder, I already anticipated that it will be the wind that blows the cobweb of discourses open.
let me close this by quoting Wordsworth.
The child is the father of man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Post a Comment