Foucault “Teadmine, võim, subjekt”

Foucault, Michel 2011. Teadmine, võim, subjekt. Valik räägitust ja kirjutatust. Tallinn: Varrak

 

Mis on valgustus? 366-390

[…] kui Kanti järgi on küsimus selles, et teada, millistest piiridest peab tunnetus nende ületamise nimel lahti ütlema, siis tänapäeva kriitika küsimus peab minu arvates naasma positiivse küsimuseasetuse juurde: milline on ainulaadse, sattumusliku, meelevaldsetest piirangutest sündinu osa kõiges selles, mis on meile antud universaalse, paratamatu ja kohustuslikuna. […] kriitikat ei rakendata enam formaalsete, universaalset väärtust omavate struktuuride otsimiseks, vaid ajaloolise uurimusena sündmustest, mis on viinud meie kujunemisele, võimaldanud meil ennast ära tunda oma tegude, mõtete, sõnade subjektina. (384-385)

[…] see on eesmärgilt genealoogiline ja meetodilt arheoloogiline. Arheoloogiline […] selles mõttes, et see ei taotle mitte kõigi teadmiste või kogu võimaliku moraalse tegevuse universaalsete struktuuride eritlemist, vaid nende diskursuste käsitlemist, mis liigendavad meie mõtteid, sõnu ja tegusid kui ajaloolisi sündmusi. Ja genealoogiline on see kriitika selles mõttes, et ei tuleta mitte meie praeguse olemise võrmist seda, mida meil on võimatu teha või teada, vaid loob sattumuslikkusest, mis on teinud meist need, kes me oleme, esile võimaluse mitte enam olla, teha või mõelda seda, mida me oleme, teeme või mõtleme. (385)

Meie endi kriitilisele ontoloogiale omast filosoofilist ethos’t iseloomustaksin ma seega kui ületatavate piiride ajaloolis-praktilist proovilepanekut, niisiis kui meie endi tööd iseenda kallal niivõrd, kuivõrd me oleme vabad. (386)

Homogeenseks referentsiväljaks ei tule võtta mitte pildid, mida inimesed endast ise annavad, ega ka tingimused, mis neid nende endi teadmata määratlevad. Vaid see, mida nad teevad ja kuidas nad seda teevad. See tähendab, need ratsionaalsuse vormid, mis organiseerivad tegemise viise (see, mida võiks nimetada nende tehniliseks aspektiks), ja vabadus, millega nad neis praktilistes süsteemides tegutsevad, reageerides teiste tegevusele ja teatud piires mängureegleid modifitseerides (see, mida võiks nimetada nende toimingute strateegiliseks küljeks). (388)

Eetika genealoogiast: poolelioleva töö ülevaade. 310-354

Mina tahan näidata, et kreeka põhiprobleem ei olnud enese techne, vaid elu techne. See oli techne tou biou – kuidas elada. (321)

Idee bios’est kui esteetilise kunstiteose materjalist on midagi, mis mind kütkestab. Samuti idee, et eetika võib olla väga tugev eksistentsistruktuur, ilma et tal oleks mingit seost juriidilisega per se, autoritaarse süsteemi ega distsiplinaarse struktuuriga. (321-322)

Arvan, et meil oleks vaja vabaneda ideest, nagu oleks eetika ja muude sotsiaalsete, majanduslike või poliitiliste struktuuride vahel analüütiline või paratamatu seos. (323)

Ideest, et meie ise ei ole meile ette antud, tuleneb minu meelest ainult üks praktiline järeldus: meil tuleb luua iseennast nagu kunstiteost. (325)

Klassikalises enesehooles oli teadmistel teistsugune roll. Teadusliku teadmise ja epimeleia heautou vahel on väga huvitavaid asju, mida analüüsida. See, kes pidas enda eest hoolt, pidi kõigi nende asjade seast, mida teaduslik teadmine võimaldab tundma õppida, valima üksnes neid, mis olid temaga seotud ja elu jaoks olulised. (337)

Taheti muuta oma elu teatavat laadi teadmise objektiks, teha sellest techne – kunst. Meie ühiskonnas pole peaaegu mitte midagi järel ideest, et peamine kunstitöö, mille eest meil tuleb hoolitseda, see tähtsaim ala, kus esteetilisi väärtusi rakendada, on meie ise, meie elu, meie eksistents. (339-340)

Niisiis, kui soovite, on hypomnemata ja enesekultuuri tähelepanuväärseks kokkujooksmispunktiks just see punkt, kus enesekultuur seab endale eesmärgiks täiusliku enesevalitsemise – teatava püsiva poliitlise suhte ise ja enese vahel. (342)

Tähtis pole mitte jälitada kirjeldamatut, paljastada varjatut ega öelda ütlematajäänut, vaid vastupidi, koguda juba öeldut, korjata kokku see, mida kuuldi või loeti, ja kõike seda eesmärgil, mis pole midagi vähemat kui iseenese moodustamine. (344)

Niisiis pole küllalt sellest, kui öelda, et subjekt moodustub sümboolses süsteemis. Subjekt ei moodustu mitte lihtsalt sümbolite mängus. Ta moodustub reaalsetes praktikates – ajalooliselt analüüsitavates praktikates. On olemas enesemoodustuse tehnoloogia, mis kasutab sümboolsed süsteemid ära ja läheb neist risti üle. (349)

Alates hetkest, mil kristlus enesekultuuri üle võttis, pandi see teataval viisil tööle pastoraalse võimu teostamiseks, nõnda et epimeleia heautou’st sai tegelikult epimeleia ton allon – teistehool –, mis oli pastori töö. Kuivõrd aga individuaalne lunastus – vähemasti teataval määral – pidi käima läbi pastoraalse institutsiooni, mille objektiks on hingede hooldamine, kadus endises mõttes ka klassikaline enesehool, see tähendab, ta integreeriti ja kaotas suure osa oma autonoomiast. (350-351)

Suhe enesega ei pea enam olema askeetlik, selleks et jõuda suhteni tõega. Tõe taipamiseks piisab sellest, kui suhe enesega paljastab mulle ilmse tõe selle kohta, mida ma enese jaoks näen. Võin seega olla ebamoraalne ja tunnetada tõde. […] Enne Descartes’i polnud võimalik olla ebapuhas ja ebamoraalne ning tunnetada tõde. Alates Descartes’ist on otsene silmanähtavus piisav. Pärast Descartes’i on meil mitteaskeetlik tunnetuse subjekt. See muutus teeb võimalikuks tänapäeva teaduse institutsionaliseerumise. (353)

Tõde ja võim. 228-262

Seda tahangi ma nimetada genealoogiaks, see tähendab niisuguseks ajaloo uurimise vormiks, mis suudab seletada teadmiste, diskursuste, objektivaldkondade jne. ülesehitamist, ilma et ta seejuures peaks viitama subjektile, mis on sündmuste välja suhtes kas transtsendentne või siis kulgeb tühja samasusena läbi terve ajaloo käigu. (239)

See, mis võimu tugevaks teeb, mis ta vastuvõetavaks muudab, on lihtne tõsiasi, et ta kunagi ei rõhu peale paljalt ei-ütleva jõuna, vaid et ta tegelikult on kõikeläbiv, et ta loob asju, tekitab naudingut, vormib teadmist, toodab diskursust; teda peab hoopis rohkem võtma produktiivse võrgustikuna, mis läheb läbi terve sotsiaalse kehami, kui negatiivse instantsina, mille funktsiooniks on ärakeelamine. (242)

Sellistes ühiskondades nagu meie oma iseloomustavad tõe poliitilist ökonoomiat viis ajalooliselt olulist tunnusjoont: tõde on keskendatud teadusliku diskursuse vormi ja nende institutsioonide ümber, mis seda toodavad; ta on allutatud pidevale majanduslikule ja poliitilisele takkakihutamisele (tõde vajab ni majanduslik tootmine kui poliitiline võim); ta on, erisugustes vormides, tohutu levitamistöö ja tarbimise objektiks  […]; teda toodetakse ja antakse edasi mõnede suurte poliitliste või majanduslike aparaatide mitte küll väljasulgeva, aga domineeriva kontrolli all (ülikool, armee, kirjutus, teabevahendid); ja lõpuks, ta on peapanus kõigis poliitilistes väitlustes ja kõigis sotsiaalsetes kokkupõrgetes (ideoloogilised võitlused). (260)

[…] tõde minu jaoks ei tähenda mitte kogumit tõeseid asju, mis tuleb avastada või omaks võtta, vaid kogumit reegleid, mille järgi tõene lahutatakse väärast ja liidetakse tõesele võimu spetsiifilised avaldused […] (260)

[…] poliitliseks peaküsimuseks pole mitte viga, illusioon, võõrandunud või ideoloogiline teadvus; selleks on tõde ise. (262)

Intellektuaalid ja võim. 170-184

Võitlus võimu vastu, võitlus võimu tuvastamiseks ja paljastamiseks seal, kus ta on kõige nähtamatum ja salakavalam. Võitlus mitte „südametunnistuse äratamiseks” […] vaid võimu õõnestamiseks ja ülevõtmiseks, üheskoos kõigi nendega, kes võimu eest võitlevad, mitte üksinda taamal, et võitlejaid valgustada. „Teooria” on selle võitluse regionaalne süsteem. (Foucault, 173)

Teooria ei totaliseeri, teooria paljuneb ja paljundab. Võimu loomuses on totaliseerida ja te ütlete väga õigesti, et teooria on loomult võimuvastane. […] Tõepoolest, see süsteem, milles me elame, ei suuda taluda kõige vähematki: see tingibki tema hapruse igas punktis, nagu ka vajaduse igakülgse repressiooni järele. Minu arvates te tegite meile esimesena […] selgeks ühe väga olulise asja: teiste eest kõnelemise väärituse. […] teooria lähtekohast peaksid lõppeks ainult otseselt asjasse segatud inimesed rääkima praktilisel moel iseenda eest. (Deleuze, 174-175)

Vangla on ainus paik, kus võim saab ennast ilmutada alastu kujul oma kõige äärmuslikumates vormides ja õigustada ennast sealjuures kõlbelise jõuna. (Foucault, 176)

[…] kui inimesed hakkavad tegutsema ja rääkima iseenda nimel, ei vastanda nad ühte esindamist (olgu see või pea peale pööratud) teisele, nad ei vastanda uut esindamist võimu väärale esindamisele. Näiteks meenub mulle, kuidas te ütlesite, et pole olemas rahvakohut, mis vastanduks tavalisele kohtule; see toimub hoopis teisel tasandil. (Deleuze, 177)

Võitlusdiskursus ei vastandu teadvustamatule: ta vastandub varjatule. […] Terve rida arusaamatusi on seotud mõistetega, nagu „peidetud”, „tõrjutud” ja „mitteöeldu”, mis lubavad odavalt „psühhoanalüüsida” seda, mis peaks olema võitluse objekt. Varjatut on tõenäoliselt keerulisem esile tuua kui teadvustamatut. (Foucault, 181)

Seega ei taga võitluste üleüldist iseloomu kindlasti mitte see totaliseerumisvorm, milles te äsja kõnelesite, see teoreetiline totaliseerimine „tõe” kujul. Võitluse üldise olemuse tagab võimu enda süsteem, kõik võimu teostamise ja rakendamise vormid. (Foucault, 184)

Agamben “The Coming Community”

Agamben, Giorgio 2005. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

The coming being is whatever being. […] The common translation of this term [quodlibet] as „whatever” in the sense of „it does not matter which, indifferently” is certainly correct, but in its form the Latin says exactly the opposite: Quodlibet ens is not „being, it does not matter which,” but rather „being such that it always matters.” (1)

One concept that escapes the antinomy of the universal and the particular has long been familiar to us: the example. In any context where it exerts its force, the example is characterized by the fact that it holds for all cases of the same type, and, at the same time, it is included among these. It is one singularity among others, which, however, stands for each of them and serves for all. On one hand, every example is treated in effect as a real particular case; but on the other, it remains understood that it cannot serve in its particularity. Neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity. […] Exemplary being is purely linguistic being. Exemplary is what is not defined by any property, except by being-called. (9-10)

It is the Most Common that cuts off any real community. Hence the impotent omnivalence of whatever being. It is neither apathy not promiscuity nor resignation. These pure singularities communicate only in the empty space of the example, without being tied by any common property, by any identity. They are expropriated of all identity, so as to appropriate belonging to itself […] (10-11)

Truth cannot be shown except by showing the false, which is not, however, cut off and cast aside somewhere else. On the contrary, according to the etymology of the verb patefacere, which means „to open” and is linked to spatium, truth is revealed only by giving space or giving a place to non-truth – that is, as a taking-place of the false, as an exposure of its own innermost impropriety. (13)

Whatever is the matheme of singularity, without which it is impossible to conceive either being or the individuation of singularity. (17)

This means that the idea and common nature do not consitute the essence of singularity, that singularity is, in this sense, absolutely inessential, and that, consequently, the criterion of its difference should be sought elsewhere than in an essence or a concept. The relationship between the common and the singular can thus no longer be conceived as the persistence of an identical essence in single individuals, and therefore the very problem of individuation risks appearing as a pseudoproblem. (18)

Decisive here is the idea of an inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns and essence. Taking-place, the communication of singularities in the attribute of extension, does not unite them in essence, but scatters them in existence. (18-19)

Whatever is the thing with all its properties, none of which, however, constitutes difference. […] the human face is neither the individuation of a generic facies nor the universalization of singular traits: It is whatever face, in which what belongs to common nature and what is proper are absolutely indifferent. (19)

[…] the passage from potentiality to act, from common form to singularity, is not an event accomplished once and for all, but an infinite series of modal oscillations. (19)

The passage from potentiality to act, from language to the word, from the common to the proper, comes about every time as a shuttling in both directions along a line of sparkling alteration on which common nature and singularity, potentiality and act change roles and interpenetrate. The being that is engendered on this line is whatever being, and the manner in which it passes from the common to the proper and from the proper to the common is called usage – or rather, ethos. (20)

What is most proper to every creature is thus its subtitutability, its being in any case in the place of the other. (23)

Ease is the proper name of this unrepresentable space. The term „ease” in fact designates, according to its etymology, the space adjacent, the empty place where each can move freely, in a semantic constellation where spatial proximity borders on opportune time (ad-agio, moving at ease) and convenience borders on the correct relation. […] In this sense, ease names perfectly that „free use of the proper” […] (25)

Only the idea of this modality of rising forth, this original mannerism of being, allows us to find a common passage between ontology and ethics. The being that does not remain below itself, that does not presuppose itself as a hidden essence that chance or destiny would then condemn to the torment of qualifications, but rather exposes itself in its qualifications, is its thus without remainder – such a being is neither accidental nor necessary, but is, so to speak, continually engendered from its own manner. (28)

Perhaps the only way to understand this free use of the self, a way that does not, however, treat existence as a property, is to think of it as a habitus, an ethos. (28-29) – But a manner of rising forth is also the place of whatever singularity […] (29)

The being that is properly whatever is able to not-be; it is capable of its own impotence. Everything rests here on the mode in which the passage from potentiality to act comes about. The symmetry between the potentiality to be and the potentiality to not-be is, in effect, only apparent. In the potentiality to be, potentiality has as its object a certain act, in the sense that for it energhein, being-in-act, can only mean passing to a determinate activity […] as for the potentiality to not-be, on the other hand, the act can never consist of a simple transition de potentia ad actum: It is, in other words, a potentiality that has as its object potentiality itself, a potentia potentiae. (35-36)

Only a powe that is capable of both power and impotence, then, is the supreme power. (36)

The world is now and forever necessarily contingent or contingently necessary. Between the not being able to not-be that sanctions the decree of necessity and the being able to not-be that defines fluctuating contingency, the finite world suggests a contingency to the second power that does not found any freedom: It is capable of not-being, it is capable of the irreparable. (40)

The fact that must contitute the point of departure for any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize. This is the only reason why something like an ethics can exist, because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible – there would be only tasks to be done. (43)

There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality. (43)

Breaking away from the double chains of biological destiny and individual biography, it took its leave of both the inarticulate cry of the tragic body and the dumb silence of the comic body, and thus appeared for the first time perfectly communicable, entirely illuminated. […] the body now became something truly whatever. (48)

While commodification unanchors the body from its theological model, it still preserves the resemblance: Whatever is a resemblance without archetype – in other words, an Idea. (48)

This is also the basic exodus of the human figure from the artwork of our times and the decline of portraiture: The task of the portrait is grasping a unicity, but to grasp a whaterverness one needs a photographic lens. (49)

And yet it is precisely this tiny displacement, this „everything will be as it is now, just a little different,” that is difficult to explain. This cannot refer simply to real circumstances, in the sense that the nose of the blessed one will become a little shorter […] The tiny displacement does not refer to the state of things, but to their sense and their limits. It does not take place in things, but at their periphery, in the space of ease between every thing and itself. This means that even though perfection does not imply a real mutation it does not simply involve an external state of things, an incurable „so be it.” (54)

[…] if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity – if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable. (65)

Whatever is the figure of singularity. Whatever singularity has no identity, it is not determinate with respect to a concept, but neither is it simply indeterminate; rather it is determined only through its relation to an idea, that is, to the totality of its possibilities. Through this relation, as Kant said, singularity borders all possibility and thus receives its omnimoda determinatio not from its participation in a determinate concept or some actual property […] but only by means of this bordering. It belongs to a whole, but without this belonging’s being able to be represented by a real condition: Belonging, being-such, is here only the relation to an empty and indeterminate totality. (67)

Whatever adds to singularity only an emptiness, only a threshold: Whatever is a singularity plus an empty space, a singularity that is finite and, nonetheless, indeterminable according to a concept. But a singularity plus an empty space can only be a pure exteriority, a pure exposure. Whatever, in this sense, is the event of an outside. (67)

The outside is not another space that resides beyond a determinate space, but rather, it is the passage, the exteriority that gives it access – in a word, it is its face, its eidos. The threshold is not, in this sense, another thing with respect to the limit; it is, so to speak, the experience of the limit itself, the experience of being-within an outside. This ek-stasis is the gift that singularity gathers from the empty hands of humanity. (68)

Being-called or being-in-language is the non-predicative property par excellence that belongs to each member of a class and at the same time makes its belonging an aporia. (73)

In other words, in the terms that interest us here, if the word through which a thing is expressed were either something other than the thing itself or identical to it, then it would not be able to express the thing. (74)

Whatever is singularity insofar as it relates not (only) to the concept, but (also) to the idea. This relation does not found a new class, but is, in each class, that which draws singularity from its synonymy, from its belonging to a class, not toward any absence of name or belonging, but toward the name itself, toward a pure and anonymous homonymy. While the network of concepts continually introduces synonymous relations, the idea is that which intervenes every time to shatter the pretense of absoluteness in these relations, showing their inconsistency. Whatever does not therefore mean only […] “substracted from the authority of language, without any possible denomination, indiscernible”; it means more exactly that which, holding itself in simple homonymy, in pure being-called, is precisely and only for this reason unnameable: the being-in-language of the non-linguistic. What remains without name here is the being-named, the name itself; only being-in-language is subtracted from the authority of language. […] the name, insofar as it names a thing, is nothing but the thing insofar as it is named by the name. (76-77)

It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans. […] The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. (80)

The risk here is that the word – that is, the non-latency and the revelation of something (anything whatsoever) – be separated from what it reveals and acquire an autonomous consistency. (81)

Whereas under the old regime the estrangement of the communicative essence of humans took the form of a presupposition that served as a common foundation, in the society of the spectacle it is this very communicativty, the generic essence itself (i.e., language), that is separated in an autonomous sphere. What hampers communication is communicability itself; humans are separated by what unites them. (82)

[…] language is not only consituted in an autonomous sphere, but also no longer even reveals anything – or better, it reveals the nothingness of all things. (82)

[…] the era in which we live is also that in which for the first time it is possible for humans to experience their own linguistic being – not this or that content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition, but the very fact that one speaks. Contemporary politics is this devastating experimentum linguae that all over the planet unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities. (83)

The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), and insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization. (85)

Whatever singularities cannot form a societas because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition. In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity – even that of a State identity within the State […] What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition). […] For the State, therefore, what is important is never the singularity as such, but only its inclusion in some identity, whatever identity […] A being radically devoid of any representable identity would be absolutely irrelevant to the State. (86)

Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. (87)

Foucault “Abnormal”

Foucault, Michel 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976. London, New York: Verso

8 January 1975

Properties of discourse:

The first property is the power to determine, directly or indirectly, a decision of justice that ultimately concerns a person’s freedom or detention, or, if it comes down to it […] life and death. So, these are the discourses that ultimately have the power of life and death.

Second property: […] these discourses also have this power by virtue of the fact that they function as discourses of truth within the judicial system. They function as discourses of truth because they are discourses with a scientific status, or discourses expressed exclusively by qualified people within a scientific institution.

Discourses that can kill, discourses of truth, and, the third property, discourses […] that make one laugh.(6)

Grotesque power, abject sovereignty – „[…] it seems to me to be a way of giving a striking form of expression to the unavoidability, the inevitability of power, which can function in its full rigor and at the extreme point of its rationality even when in the hands of someone who is effectively discredited. (13)

1)      […] expert psychiatric opinion allows the offense, as defined by the law, to be doubled with a whole […] series of forms of conduct, of ways of being that are, of course, presented in the discourse of the psychiatric expert as the cause, origin, motivation, and starting point of the offence. […] in the reality of judicial practice they constitute the substance, the very material to be punished. (15) Its essential role is to legitimize, in the form of scientific knowledge, the extension of punitive power to something that is not a breach of the law. (18)

2)      […] to double the author of the offense with this new character of the delinquent […] (18) […] it tries to establish the antecedents below the threshold, as it were, of the crime. […] In other words, the aim is to show how the individual already resembles his crime before he has committed it. (19)

3)      Its function is to constitute, to call up, another doubling, or rather, a group of further doublings. There is the constitution of a doctor who is at the same time a doctor-judge. (21-22) Conversely, faced with the doctor, the judge will also divide into two. […] when the judge has to deal with this ethico-moral double of the juridical subject, it is not the offense he punishes. […] The sordid business of punishing is thus converted into the fine profession of curing. As well as serving other ends, expert psychiatric opinion serves to effect this conversion. (23)

We have shifted from the juridical problem of the attribution of responsibility to a completely different problem. […] penal sanction will not be brought to bear on a legal subject who is recognized as being responsible but on an element that is the correlate of a technique that consists in singling out dangerous individuals and of taking responsibility for those who are accessible to penal sanction in order to cure them or reform them. […] from now on, a technique of normalization will take responsibility for the delinquent individual. (25)

15 January 1975

The whole field of notions of perversity, converted in the field of judicial power and, converted into their puerile vocabulary, enables medical notions to function in the field of judicial power and, conversely, juridical notions to function in medicine’s sphere of competence. This set of notions functions, then, as a switch point, and the weaker it is epistemologically, the better it functions. (33)

Another operation performed by expert opinion is the replacement of the institutional alternative „either prison or hospital”, „either atonement or cure”, by the principle of homogeneity of social response. (33) This institutional system is aimed at the dangerous individual, that is to say, at the individual who is not exactly ill and who is not strictly speaking criminal. […] Danger and perversion constitute, I think, the essential theoretical core of expert medico-legal opinion. (34)

Essentially, both justice and psychiatry are adulterated in expert medico-legal opinion. They do not deal with their own object; they do not work in accordance with their own norms. Expert medico-legal opinion does not address itself to delinquents or innocents or to those who are sick as opposed to those who are well. It addresses itself, I believe, to the category of “abnormal individuals”. Or, if you prefer, expert medico-legal opinion is not deployed in a field of opposition, but in a field of gradation from the normal to the abnormal. (41-2)

Foucault “The Use of Pleasure”

Foucault, Michel 1992. The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality Volume 2. Penguin Books

Freedom and truth

This individual freedom should not, however, be understood as the independence of a free will. Its polar opposite was not a natural determinism, nor was it the will of an all-powerful agency: it was an enslavement – the enslavement of the self by oneself. To be free in relation to pleasures was to be free of their authority; it was not to be their slave. (79)

In order not to be excessive, not to do violence, in order to avoid the trap of tyrannical authority (over others) coupled with a soul tyrannized by desires, the exercise of political power required, as its own principle of internal regulation, power over oneself. (80-81)

This freedom-power combination that characterized the mode of being of the moderate man could not be conceived without a relation to truth. To rule one’s pleasures and to bring them under the authority of the logos formed one and the same enterprise […] (86)

The relationship to the logos in the practice of pleasures:

1)      There was a structural form: moderation implied that the logos be placed in a position of supremacy in the human being and that it be able to subdue the desires and regulate behavior. (86)

2)      Instrumental form – since one’s domination of the pleasures ensures a use that is adaptable to needs, times, and circumstances, a practical reason is necessary in order to determine, as Aristotle says, “the things he ought, as he ought, and when he ought.” (87)

3)      The ontological recognition of the self by the self (88)

[…] be it in the form of a hierarchical structure of the human being, in the form of a practice of prudence or of the soul’s recognition of its own being, the relation to truth constituted an essential element of moderation. […] this relation to truth never took the form of a decipherment of the self by the self, never that of a hermeneutics of a desire. It was a factor constituting the mode of being of the moderate subject; it was not equivalent to an obligation for the subject to speak truthfully concerning himself; it never opened up the soul as a domain of potential knowledge where barely discernible traces of desire needed to be read and interpreted. The relation to truth was a structural, instrumental, and ontological condition for establishing the individual as a moderate subject leading a life of moderation; it was not an epistemological condition enabling the individual to recognize himself in his singularity as a desiring subject and to purify himself of the desire that was thus brought to light. (89)

Now, while this relation to truth, constitutive of the moderate subject, did not lead to a hermeneutics of desire, it did on the other hand open onto an aesthetics of existence. And what I mean by this is a way of life whose moral value did not depend either on one’s being in conformity with a code of behavior, or on effort of purification, but on certain formal principles in the use of pleasures, in the way one distributed them, in the limits one observed, in the hierarchy one respected. (89)

The principle according to which this activity was meant to be regulated, the “mode of subjection”, was not defined by a universal legislation determining permitted and forbidden acts; but rather by a savoir-faire, an art that prescribed the modalities of a use that depended on different variables (need, time, status). (91)

In the Christian morality of sexual behavior, the ethical substance was to be defined not by the aphrodisiac, but by a domain of desires that lie hidden among the mysteries of the heart, and by a set of acts that are carefully specified as to their form and their conditions. Subjection was to take the form not of a savoir-faire, but of a recognition of the law and an obedience to pastoral authority. Hence the ethical subject was to be characterized not so much by the perfect rule of the self by the self in the exercise of a virile type of activity, as by self-renunciation and a purity whose model was to be sought in virginity. (92)

Putting it schematically, we could say that classical antiquity’s moral reflection concerning the pleasures was not directed toward a codification of acts, nor toward a hermeneutics of the subject, but toward a stylization of attitudes and an aesthetics of existence. (92)

Lagopoulos “From Stick to the Region”

Lagopoulos, Alexandros Ph. 1993. From the Stick to the Region: Space as a social instrument of semiosis. – Semiotica 96-1/2. 87-138

For Eco, the arhitectural object is, semiotially speaking, a sign-vehile, a signifier, denoting its ‚primary funtion’. Thus, the stick does not denote the space delimited by it, but in connection with it denotes the function performed by the stick (for example, to measure the position of the sun, to indicate a point of reference); this conceived function is cultural unit. (90)

It is on this spatial aspect of architectural meaning that Greimas, contrary to Eco and closer to the traditional architectural view, insists, arguing that the spatial signifiers have their own immediate signifieds, with whic they constitute the spatial language; the integration of these signifieds into new ones leads to autonomous discourses on space. (92)

[…] the architectural work may have elementary forms; that even restricted parts of an architectural whole may be endowedwith meaning; that the spatial signifier is not necessarily a well-formedshape, especially as we move from architectural to urban space; and that not only the connotations of space, but even the denotations may engage any possible cultural code. (93)

[…] the central ideological themes of a culture may appear at different scales, be incorporated in different semiotic systems, and be expressed through different morphological elements. (96)

The property signs [in Nicholas V time] thus functioned as metalinguistic signs pointing to the owner of a building. The result of this metalinguistic function was to create the architectural denotation of the owner of the building, and this denotation led to the insertion of the building in the connotative network discussed above. At this point, I would like to remind the reader of my view, presented in the theoretical introduction to this article, about the existence of non-functional denotative architectural signifieds; the denotation just examined belongs to a personal-legal code and constitutes a personal-legal space. (103)

[…] the location of the pope’s insignia in Rome create a semiotic system unfolding in urban space, anchored in architecture, and initiated by small-scale para-architectural signs. These signs are identical and repetitive, and thus the text they constitute, on their own level, does not emerge from their syntax; their function as a whole is to extend the patronage code from the individual structure of the whole of the city. (105)

[…] it is not the physical setting that ‚can furnish the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication’ [Lynch]; on the contrary, space is at the service of meaning and spatial orientation a meaningful orientation. (105)

There is, thus, a continuous transmission of meaning between the two syntagmatically related elements: the city semantizes the threshold as its threshold, and the protection of the threshold semantizes the city as protected, as the threshold is. Sculpture, architecture, and urban space, viewed from the urban standpoint, are the nodes for the circulation of meaning. (106)

The Borgo plan is, as Constantinople, a new Rome and a condensed image of existing Rome. The symbolic unification of the city which it achieves finds its exact parallel in the unification of the Vatican and the Lateran, the two extremities of the axis urbis, through the multiple orientation pattern. We pass with this pattern from the general urban message of Nicholas’s insignia to the new messages added to it by the specific syntactic and semantic relations between the sites to which certain of these insignia are attached. Because of the identification of the axis urbis uniting these sites with a cosmicaxis, new messages emerge involving the city as a whole. In this manner, these latter messsages resemble the general message of the insignia in that both relate to the city as a whole. The two types of messages differ, however, in that the message of the insignia originates in an unstructured geographical reality, while the messages sent by the axes of the city are anchored in a structured pattern, which in itself generates meaning not simply through repetition, but through articulation. It goes without saying that these levels of meaning are only analytically discernible, since they are in practice interwoven. (116)

The planned quadripartite settlement was not uncommon in the medieval period, either as a strict geometric form os as a looser spatial organization, but what in the cities seems to have been mainly retained as the spatial expression of the cosmic heavenly Jerusalem are the radiating divine center and the outer limits dividing chaos from cosmos. (117)

I concluded earlier that the Vatican is a summit on the basis of the structural similarities betweeb the Borgo plan and the city of Rome. In both cases, which are related as part to whole, the same symbolic model was used. The same cosmic model is used irrespective of the urban scale, as was the case with urban and regional space […] a semiotic mechanism identical to that already studied of the incorporation of the same themes in different semiotic systems. It is not, then, strange in this context to find different points in space characterized by the same qualities – for example, centrality or extremity. This is a contradiction only for rational thought. Symbolic thought is qualitative, and the same qualities may be attached to quite different objects and spaces. The cosmic model is projected not only on the horizontal plane, but also on the vertical plane, absorbing in this manner all of three-dimensional space. (125-126)

[…] the radial pattern is interwoven with the concentric pattern. The twelve parts of Plato’s city follow from the subdivision of the four quarters of a circle defined by two perpendicular diameters. Plato explains in Timaeus how the universe was created through the bending of the two bars of a cross into two circles. The twelve parts of the ideal city correspond to the twelve months of the year (i.e one revolution of the universe). On the basis of our data, we may conclude that, in respect to the urban model, the passage from Middle Ages to the Renaissance, effected through the mediation of Greek and Roman antiquity, was founded on the cosmic cross. (130)

… aesthetization of a cosmological model in renaissance (architecture and art – perspective) (133)

Renaissance urban model:

1)      the denotative level, corresponding to the description of the elements of the urban form and expressed in the latter. (Metonymic)

2)      Connotative level – symbolic and aesthetic considerations, follow from metaphorical connections.

3)      Pragmatic: from the military point of view, the radial plan was a pragmatic adaptation to the physics of artillery. (134)