Decoding Foucault's ideas around the incongruous, epistome and the hypothetical plane. The hypothetical plane applies in that it is the ideal space within which ideas can fully be isolated, dissected and have an uninterrupted discussion with other ideas.
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The Order of things – Michel Foucault (1989)
reference: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences pg. 16-26 (Preface, London and New York: Routledge, 1989)
Pg. 16– Enumeration –
'what is impossible is not the propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which propinquity would be possible…. Where could they ever meet except in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration, or the page transcribing it? – Where else could they be juxtaposed except in the non-place of language?'
The Gallery as a place vs the ideal of the white cube as a non-place. (The isolation and homelessness of artworks when installed into a non-space)
Links to the juxtaposition in soviet montage theory and in Black Girl’s finale sequence.
Links between the anti-real spaces of the white cube and of digital spaces to the ‘non-place’ of language.
- Pg. 17 – The Incongruous (Not in harmony with the surroundings) & The Hypothetical Plane – 'The operating table is proposed in such juxtapositions as a great hypothetical plane in which ‘enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences. The table which since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.’
Link to the difficulties in classifying intermedia and sonic artworks in contemporary art.
Dealing with semiotics and how to deal with the grand aesthetics of abstract nouns and concepts we know as linguistics. By placing concepts in the Hypothetical plane, to operate on these ideas and terms of classification, examining their structure and introducing new ‘unknown’ concepts to fit them in to our structuralist understanding of the world around us.
- The Heteroclite – ‘The suspicion that there is a worse disorder than that of the incongruous.’ - (Where the incongruous appears to be a single idea which places itself out of the harmony of our structural understanding of the world around us; The Heteroclite is itself a system of ‘linking together… things that are inappropriate’ -in other words an abnormal structure which goes against our structures of understanding and ‘glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry.)
The word ‘heteroclite’ is explained to be interpreted with etymological literacy, in a state where things are ‘laid’ or ‘arranged’ together, although their sites are so different. (– in a sense links to the idea of the ‘random’, which is truly impossible in our causal world and instead can be defined as an unpredictable unrelated result.)
links the ideas of the heteroclite to the dialogue of sound art in the Western contemporary art scene, whereby incongruous artworks are juxtaposed not because of their shared predicate of a focus on sound, but instead because a sonic element is produced, even sometimes unintentionally – David Toop’s ‘Sonic Boom’ as a heteroclite space, aligns with Neuhaus’ critique of ‘sound art’.
The idea of a heterotopia as a conceptual place of cultural heteroclite structures.
- Pg. 19 – Atopia and Aphasia
Atopia as being defined as a place/ society with no territorial borders
Aphasia as being defined as Greek for speechlessness, likely here applied to a named concept being undefinable.
- A defining of order – At once it is that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by (language).
If this grid becomes too reductive, then it is important that it is reexamined to better reflect the attitudes and culture it proposes to be used within.
The fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.
- Pg. 21 – Liberating from order
‘Thus, between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge, there is a middle region which liberates order itself: it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question’.
It is between the encoded recognition of the eye and the reflexive knowledge of how something relates to the order it has itself programmed that new models emerge. These new models, do not fit perfectly and therefore are reflexively rejected. Sound Art could be an example of this.
‘Between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and of its modes of being.’
Between/ behind the order we have superimposed onto our experience of reality is the greater undefinable order of nature – links to Plato’s allegory of the cave.
Beyond the grid that we have formulated to understand the world, there is a perfect order by which all things co-align. It is the ultimate goal of language to relate knowledge within the perfect order.
Thoughts:
Activation through relation of sound, - according to definitions of sound. – If your definition of sound relies on the frequencies of physical air paritcles being registered by human ears then it cannot in a sense be contained in a gallery like a painting could be per se.
Application to own research Project:
- Applies to the semiotics of defining order between genres.
- The idea of atopia and aphasia can apply to both the indefinable qualities of sound art as well as the non-space of the gallery.
- The Art gallery as a heterotopia, an institutionally different system, space and time/ experience is controlled and designed to fit in with certain rules. Regulating people’s behaviours, Foucault is not necessarily criticizing all this, because it is an important stage in implementing order into the chaos.
- A change in the perspective, reveals the order of these systems, can allow a more distanced view to examine how well these systems work.
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