This content introduces Michel Foucault's "The Archaeology of Knowledge," arguing that disciplines like history are not neutral representations of the past but rather constructed mechanisms that shape our understanding of the world and ourselves, often by excluding or marginalizing certain perspectives.
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hey everyone back again today I'm
starting a four-part series on Michelle
fuko's the archaeology of knowledge
which I've actually covered before as
more of a conversational type broad
overview of the text with my buddy Alex
you can go and listen to that if you
want it's super useful uh for a more
laid-back breakdown discussion of the
themes of this book why it's important
and all that but now I think it's
important to also do more of a deep dive
dissection of the book because it's
super important if you want to
understand fuko's thought if you want to
understand discourse analysis and if you
want to really understand the world and
you want to understand the many ways in
which we come to delimit various
disciplines to say that there's this
thing called history and then there's
this thing called physics and then
there's this thing called mathematics
whatever Fuko quate simply here is
asking us to consider What mechanisms
are in place to allow allow disciplines
to emerge at all and these disciplines
then come to affect the way that humans
that people come to understand history
the world their neighbors and themselves
in so many ways now that was a big
Preamble before saying hi I'm David if
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this is happening or I'm recording this
against the backdrop of Israel's
Relentless Slaughter of Palestinians and
capture of pales inian land which has
been going on for more than 100 years
and I've done a number of episodes on
this providing a history to Zionism and
to Israel's occupation of Palestine and
the Palestinian people and
systematically denying Palestinians
rights denying Palestinians sovereignty
uh and autonomy to be able to live free
of military occupation free of the
violence that Israel inflicts against
Palestinians on a daily basis and it's
not just like some flare up in in
Israel's political party where some
would like to say oh since the the 90s
when there have been this Progressive
the early 2000s this Progressive
heightened uh like extreme political
extremism in Israel some people like to
say oh it's because of that when no this
this violence is embedded within the
very fabric of the Zionist logic and the
violence will continue so long as that
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because of Israel's Relentless
violence okay kind of a long intro let's
let's jump into this just brief ly one
more thing like I said this is going to
be four episodes pretty much every
episode is going to cover each part of
the book Let's jump into Michelle fuko's
the archaeology of knowledge now before
starting this it's important that you
know we just ask some questions we ask
some questions what is history like what
what really is history I don't mean to
like editorialize or grandstand or
anything like that but like when you
really sit down for a moment and
question what history is uh I hope that
you'd you'd kind of in you know you'd be
dissatisfied with what you might have
previously believed so history is just
the presentation in in the most
reductive way the presentation of the
past now there are so many history books
right there are so many it would be like
almost impossible to read them all
almost it would be impossible to read
them all there's no possible way anyone
could do that and just think about your
own life think about your own life and
try to imagine how many books it would
take for somebody to recount your entire
life it'll probably take thousands of
books because you need to add
interpretation you need to add so many
different nuances and understandings of
who you are you'd you'd inevitably have
to consider so many other factors that
would require their own history books to
figure out how they have affected you
and shaped who you are and so if you
just think about that for a moment think
about the difficulty in recounting your
own life and this is just putting aside
the impossibility of anyone to truly
understand themselves like we know this
from the psychoanalyst like the
difficulty that's always presented to us
when we try to convey our feelings our
understanding of ourselves we run into
some serious roadblocks we are limited
by language which is a nitian point from
n and I'll explain in a minute don't get
scared I'll explain what I mean by that
in a minute but now imagine the entirety
of human history the entirety of since
we've been human as far as like our
physiological structure maybe about
100,000 years maybe a little more I mean
something like that and
imagine the kind of hubris that is
required for us to think that we somehow
have a grasp of history and I'm not
saying we we shouldn't study it of
course we should but it's it's kind of
audacious for us to think that we can and
and
auspicious favorable to success in
thinking that somehow we can properly
represent history when history as we
know it is comprised of millions of
people doing so many different things in
so many different places influenced by
so many other different things that it
already seems like somewhat of an
impossible task and the problem gets
really it gets compounded when we
consider the many millions and millions
of people who are just erased in history
when you open up your textbooks uh your
history textbooks chances are if you're
in North America most of the people
you're going to be reading about are
white dudes just a fact are were white
dudes the only people in history no were
the only people were they the only
people who did anything meaningful no
however this goes to show just as like a
a kind of Preamble just as a brief
illustration how history isn't just this
neutral thing that just looks at this
quote unquote neutral past and seeks to
represent it instead history might be a
way to convey certain interests to tell
certain stories about the past to shape
public Consciousness about the past in a
way to affect the future because if you
shape people's understandings of the
past you can shape their understanding
of the future and how they will act in
the future now I said that this was a
nian point what I'm what I mean by that
is I'm pulling from his in truth and
lying in a non-moral sense or an
extraoral sense depending on the
translation in which n says that so long
as we are using language we are kind of
deceiving ourselves
because he says that really the only
truth that we can find in language that
we arrive at through language is truth that's
that's
been separated from us it's an
artificial truth so he gives the example
of mammals and he says humans love to
content themselves with identifying
mammals out in the world but n says like
what really is a mammal I mean that's a
word we've given to describe certain
creatures on Earth and when we see a
thing that complies with the definition
and the specific characteristics and
attributes we associate with that
definition when we identify a creature
out in the world that fits those
criteria does that actually mean
anything to the creature itself or is
this just a way by which humans come to
categorize the world humans come to
capture the world humans come to
organize the world there's a really
great quote I think it's from I think
it's from I I love pronouncing French
people's names in French cuz the
comments the comments are always so
funny what like why are you pronouncing
it like that uh but Roland bars bars as
some would like me to sayand B has a
kind of an image he he provides us where
he says how many shades of green does a
newborn or a child capable of seeing
colors See
in the grass as they as they crawl
through the grass they probably see what
might be to us an infinite number of
colors yet it's something that as adults
were taught oh it's it's just green you
know the grass is just green or we can
use another example of tree tree is an
innocuous word right tree doesn't offend
anyone I hope but trees are an
interesting phenomenon because if I say
or if I tell you to imagine a tree every
single one of you listening and myself
has conjured up a different image of a
tree in our minds so n says that in this case
case
language per performs the function of
effacing differences and leaving only
this kind of pure artificiality in in
their wake what we have is the word tree
and it's meant to stand in for all of
these variations of trees it is meant to
actually kind of round off all the
differences and leave us just with with
this this pure artificiality in its wake
so language is always bound up in this
process of excluding things that's how
that's the only way we're able to use
language at all no two people have the
same image of a tree coming to their
mind or a chair or a computer or
whatever we use language as a way to
simplify the world but it's not a
neutral act it is very much bound up
with certain histories it is very much
bound up with certain interests in how
these words are going to be taken up and
what they are going to exclude in their
being um uttered uttered in their being
said but to go back now to the text
history is not even something that has
enjoyed a static kind of consistent
history history has undergone various
changes in the way that it was conducted
for a long time history was it sought to
find these broad Strokes in the past to
reduce entire eras entire periods to
like these singular World Views or ways
of understanding uh the Earth but of
course that in no way or societ
in no way did did these worldviews
actually capture everybody's views of
anything it just captured you know those
few people who could write things down
that historians could then read later
which is why there's like an fundamental
bias found within history itself where
we are only capable partly through
colonialism through the systematic
eraser of indigenous ways of knowing and
knowledges we have covered over all of
that in the West in favor of the written
word we only maintain those histories
we've only maintained those histories
that were written down which is just one
of many ways to actually collect history
there's also oral storytelling there's
storytelling through music and history
keeping through music and and and other
forms like that through navigation
through geography through so many things
that gets erased in favor of the written
word and so all of those knowledges that
have been kept in human history and I'm
using the term human history in like the
broadest sense of like all people at all
times just everyone in the past how much
of that has been erased how much of that
has been
forgotten by the academic Gatekeepers in
the realm of history in in their
appreciation of uh the written word so
history used to be really committed to
just finding out these singular homogeneous
homogeneous
worldviews it looked for
totalities Universal holes to grasp
entire periods and eras any deviation or
disperate event or event or phenomenon
or person that didn't comply would then
be situated within somehow it would be
like really shoehorned in there or it
would be seen as some coincidental
departure from that established Norm or
world viiew or era or period or whatever
now writing this in the late 1960s Fuko
began to observe actually a
transformation in the way that history
was being conducted in the Historical
Method that began to somewhat
problematize the previous efforts within
history to just reduce entire peoples to
a singular worldview or to homogenize
all people and this is something that I
hope eventually one day we're able to
look back upon in the concept of Lake
Nations to undo the way that nationhood
the way that nationality has been used
to homogenize people to reduce them to
an artificial idea about what they
should be now he describes this
transformation the transformation from
history looking at Broad
temporalization from doing that to being
a little bit more looking at things a
little bit more specifically and problem
izing these periodizations these Dev and
the way it treats deviations and so on
he calls this the transformation or the
shift from Total history to General
history now General history is not
something to necessarily celebrate if
you know you're hearing this and you're
like oh well a more nuanced view
approach to history would probably be
good I mean you want to include more
perspectives right you want to include
more ideas you want more people involved
you don't want to reduce them to these Broad
Broad
temporalization but we really can't be
fooled here this new method did not do
away with the older one it simply
reappropriated it to account for really
exploding knowledges and New Media that
allowed more people to actually share
their experiences share their knowledges
share the histories that they knew on a
localized individual level suddenly
history was confront or the history as
far as like the study of history the
history discipline was confronted with
all all of these different testimonies
and it had to find a way to make sense
of them while also retaining its love of
reducing the past to what is manageable
to what is
organization organizable nice David in
short it found itself needing
to periodize all these new periods that
were being opened up and discovered to
meth methodize the methods of History to
establish what he calls a series of
series to find a way to insert a
homogeneous totalizing framework to
account for all of these new ideas for
all of these New Perspectives that had
historically just been totally ignored by
by
historians so in other words it was
looking for a new way to explain
ruptures to explain
discontinuities to explain disperate
events and deviations without abandoning
the Historical Method Al together it
couldn't get rid of that Historical
Method now we saw other things were
going on in different fields like if you
went outside of history there were there
were other big changes going on in other
fields so elsewhere in disciplines like
the history of philosophy or art or
science or literature where there is
like a historical component when you
study philosophy you're studying the
probably going to have to study the
Greeks St Augustine you know decal
you're going to read all these people
you're going to engage in the history of
philosophy science maybe not so much I
mean if if someone does a science degree
you're probably not learning about like
I don't know who's a if you're doing
biology you're probably not learning
about pum or Bale or something you know
the history within science is not really
as important when you're learning it
because a lot of that stuff is outdated
and it's actual practice today in any
case there are still people who study
like the history of science or the
history of literature so on
but in these other fields there was
another transformation taking place not
the same one found in history in this
transformation from Total history to
General history instead we saw the
abandonment of the search for Origins
homogeneous periods unitary eras in
favor of a new type of rationality so in
his words this approach seems to be
seeking and discovering more and more
discontinuities where as history itself
appears to be abandoning the eruption of
events in favor of stable structures so
what that means in non fukan English is
that he's saying that history was still
trying to locate to use these overall
homogeneous methods to homogenize
history to make sense of History because
otherwise I mean history is kind of
doomed from the start because it's
history is too big and expansive it has
to be selective but in that
selectivity it is going to reveal just
how committed it is to only certain
histories to only certain narratives
those that largely follow a European
Western um trajectory whereas these
other fields Fuko suggest we of the
history of science the history of
philosophy the history of literature he
said there was something else going on
and there was seem to be more of a
welcoming of of discontinuities of rupt
to be able to look at something that
didn't quite fit within a cannon within
an established field and they didn't try
to just make sense of it by being like
Oh uh the coincidence that we shouldn't
consider that uh or like oh it fits
within the cannon because of this reason
you know either of those methods either
of those approaches would uphold the
Cannon as being like absolutely
unchanging determinative of everything
else around it as like a kind of
gravitational black hole that shapes
everything uh everything around it and
and and fits everything within it these
other fields were instead they would
they would encounter something that
didn't quite fit in with a previously
established Cannon and instead of saying
oh uh that belongs outside or it belongs
inside for XYZ reasons these fields were
saying that's different I don't know
what that is let's explore it
and this isn't necessarily something
that Fuko is celebrating either I think
that he's giving it a little bit more
credit than the Historical Method but in
any case it represents an interesting
transformation and it sets the stage for
what will be his archaeological approach
so the archaeology of knowledge where
spoiler alert archaeology at least one
of its characteristics is to search for
discontinuities and to look at them as discontinuity
discontinuity
because that will call into question the
very continuity that is implied or
imposed upon history to establish a
history at all to establish periods to
establish temporality to establish a
cannon now to really illustrate the
different approaches within history Fuko
considers the differences between the
document in history and the monument so
traditional history so history way of
the past you know the history looking
for these broad understandings of like
entire eras and reducing them to these
simple things traditional history
encountered monuments or relics or
anything from that time or historians
like archaeologists or going and digging
stuff up and they're like oh look at
this cool thing we found or there's a
monument that stood in for something or
or whatever so traditional history would
encounter monuments or relics and then
sought to transform them into documents
and what he means by that by
transforming a thing found into
something that can be read understood
and made intelligible what he is saying
about this is that traditional history
sought to transform things it found into
being kind of evidence of an entire way
of people thought which is so I mean
it's so reductive to find like an object
and to be like all the people thought
this way or this is somehow
determinative of an entire period that
which now I you know historians are
probably not going to want to
do so just to be clear traditional
history would find monuments it it's
looking at the past it's finding things
it's digging things up quite literally
sometimes finding things and then
turning them into readable things that
could then stand in for these periods
within General history though with this
transformation he said say that the
reverse takes place instead of
transforming monuments or relics or
things that are found or things that are
or or like the expression of a people
and turning them into the written word
that can be properly
intelligize made
intelligible uh and then and then read
and understood he's saying that history
began to do the opposite of transforming
documents into
monuments where
something happened with within
historical analysis where it began to approach
approach
monuments in a pretty
Brazen hubristic way I don't know huis
is my word of the day I guess uh where
it was like oh yeah we know what this
means we we totally know what this means
we are actually going we are so sure we
know what this means this this object
that we just know it's just going to
stand in for all these people so they
treat it as like a document that can be
immediately understood as just something
that just makes sense and then
transforming it then into a monument
that that now stands in for all of these
people however by reversing the
procedure what we are seeing then is the
adoption of a willingness to kind of go
down various routes of various monuments
that are taken as documents but various
monuments that are taken as documents
because they are so easily intelligible
as a sign of the certainty that
historian have really embraced during
this as a product of this
transition so here we see a
confirmation not of the monument as a
relic of the past really or standing in
for people or anything like that but
what we are really seeing and Fuko
really wants us to be aware of we are
seeing the Historical Method presenting
itself as neutral and
objective perhaps we may even think of
the museum here you know the Museum
performs a very interesting function in
so many different ways the museum like
is such a violent institution yet it is
one that I will defend tooth and nail as
being super important while
acknowledging that it needs serious
changes where you go into a museum and
you walk in and you see the little uh
the your cou or your whatever the map or
giving you an idea about what's like uh
what's where what's where in the museum
and you got your
Egypt over there and you got your uh I
don't know you got your Chinese history
over there you have Europe opan history
over there you have the many different
indigenous Nations histories uh over
there as though it is possible to
construct a space that contains
histories as though histories can just
be put side by side in these different
rooms and just opened up to a kind of
spectacle and people come in
and they can just receive these
histories without ever really
questioning the very structure the very
medium through which they are accessing
these histories as though history can
just be this neutral thing that you pay
$30 for you or maybe it's subsidized
maybe it's free you walk in you can go
from room to room you go from Egypt to
Europe whatever you go through all of
these different places all these
different rooms and you're just
receiving history you are and all of
these monuments that you're encountering
are totally intelligible to you not
because any of us that walk into the
museum actually understands any of these
objects at all their their historical
significance their significance at the
time uh to whom and so on but they are
entirely intelligible because we are in
a museum and we know exactly what we are
supposed to be doing in relation to
these objects in a museum they are just
meant to be monuments for us monuments
that stand in for the neutrality and
objectivity of History itself and it's
not like this history is being reduced I
mean most of the time museums are are
curated with the utmost respect and
historians have so much respect for
these artifacts for these cultural icons
for these relics and so on I'm not
saying they don't we're getting at a
deeper issue here related to the very
logic of History
itself so within this space within the
museum there may be a new acceptance of
ruptures and discontinuities it might
there might be this new exhibit about
this thing that's just found and yada
yada yada no one knows what it is let's
let's explore it let's try to understand
this thing in itself not try to reduce
it to like a cannon because it was found
in Egypt or something and then reduce it
to the entirety of egyptology or
something like let's give it a little
bit more space to breathe and to find
its own way like
that that could be happening in a museum
and that's great but what is really
happening in the acceptance of these new
ruptures and
discontinuities what we are really
seeing is the confirmation of History
itself what we are really seeing is the
confirmation of the museum as a
representation of History itself so
history no longer collapses all
deviations to a single period or to a
totality it welcomes them and looks to
to fix boundaries reveal
relations formulate laws describe these
relations Etc between these newly
discovered things not by reducing them
to something but to find to find
relations to make them intelligible to
understand why a thing might exist why
it once existed to situate it somewhere
like why why do we do this at all it's
very very interesting process now in the
history of philosophy remember I
described the other history fields or
these other fields doing history history
of philosophy of literature Etc there is
a more radical departure from the
traditional history for example like we
can just think about Marxism and Marxism
has just been has been a great
Enterprise just reveal among other
things that history is not just a
neutral thing in fact the history that
we've learned is a history that reflects
upper class interests and it
historically has been you are likely to
read about people who are rich that's
just a simple fact most of your history
books is going to be presenting people
who had money and or power which
normally just go hand inand but this
this reveals how history is entirely
ideological now we may observe a similar
transformation in other fields albeit
with less resistance than in history so
for example there's structuralism and
Fuko is called you know is often called
a post structuralist a postar a postm
Marxist well yeah uh a postmodernist
other things like that not a title he
willingly embraced even though this
entire book is a criticism of
structuralism but even to say that
implies that structuralism is this
bounded easily intelligible homogeneous
thing which Fuko is asking us to be a
little bit wary of doing but in any case
we find in
structuralism uh a recognition of
something different it it recognizes
differences and studies them but reduces
them to structure like semiotics so
semiotics to be really brief um we know
language doesn't mean anything we know
it's useful but if I use the word like I
said tree everyone has a different idea
about tree in their minds so there is a
a split between the signifier
T and the thing it's meant to represent
the the signified and so in this case it
might seem as though semiotics which
studies these kinds of relationships is
prepared to accept that there are many
millions billions infinite number of
ways to represent things in the world
because we can just come up with
different sounds to represent them but
that's you know you can't really have a
field or or a discipline if you're
saying that because then what is there
to study you're just saying oh it could
be anything we could use any word to
study something or to represent
something so semioticians and linguists
do others we can think of Chomsky here
as well sought to try to find out what
was Universal among all languages
because there has to be some kind of you
some kind of like underlying consistency
that unites all languages for for
Chomsky these are the syntatic
syntactic syntactic structures that is
the structures that make it possible at
all for us to have linguistic
communication what kinds of structure am
I following in order for me to deliver
words that you can then make sense of as
The Listener I must be following some
kind of a structure similarly if I was
speaking uh
K I'm following some structure that
someone else must be also aware of to
properly understand me so language goes
well beyond just the words you're using
using but the very structure the
syntax that you are using to
communicate that uh those words that
language so another example I like to
give to illustrate structuralism is with
fairy tales so for a while people
thought that fairy tales were a way a
peak into what is universal about us
like Universal cautionary tales like
Little Red Riding Hood or tales about
humility or
whatever but upon further examination
it's actually come to come to find that
some of the most popular fairy tales
were just kind of Frozen in time because
you had the Grim Brothers you had other
guys in Europe Charles I don't know
whatever their names there was a point
in my life when I knew this uh but in
any case we when we are actually
accessing fairy tales are not accessing
age-old knowledge we are accessing
actually High edited stories that have
been transformed from the oral tradition
into the written form that that kind of
freezes the stories and we're we see
them readapted with like Disney and
other readaptation that push the limits
of that of those fairy tales but in any
case there's a kind of violence that is
done when a story when an oral tale is
written down because it freezes that
oral tale and if you have someone
writing it like the Grim brothers who
are coming from you know a pretty rich
European background chances are their
worldview is going to then have some
kind of an impact on the way that that
story is written down and then ret told
so the structuralists I might say I'm
not saying they're saying this but they
might say oh well fairy tales are a peak
into like Universal human values whereas
a poststructuralist might say or or are
you just extrapolating from a single
worldview and saying that it is
universal you know how can we really
claim that anything is universal given
how difficult it is to recount even a
single history so history has resisted
its own transformation to uphold in
fuko's words the sovereignty of
Consciousness in its teleological
movement through and expression in time
so he continues well most of that was my
words but in his words continuous
history is the indispensable correlative
of the subject the guarantee that
everything that has eluded him will be
restored to him the certainty that time
will disperse nothing without restoring
it in a reconstituted Unity the promise
that one day the subject in the form of
historical consciousness will once again
be be able to appropriate to bring back
under his sway all those things that are
kept at a distance by
difference so what does that mean well
just in the way that I was saying before
that in order for history to exist at
all it needs to greatly reduce the thing
that it's studying for history to exist
it has to severely limit history
otherwise it would be too chaotic to
really be a discipline at all there'd be
too many narratives too many ways of
understanding too many methods of
History to even count and Fuko says that
the history that we've come to craft in
the West in uh in the kind of
recordkeeping that we do in our
relationship to the past is one that
seeks not to actually understand the
past as much as it seeks to impose
ourselves onto the past to locate
ourselves in the past to understand that
we as a sovereign subjects capable of
looking at the past in such a uh a
neutral objective way the jeopard
ification of history is what I like to
call it where you can have TV shows that
just like reduce history to number
values like $300 for ancient Greek
history or something I mean what does
that say about us in our reduction of
History to that like no attachment to it
no respect for it just reducing it to
something that we can just passively
consume in like a museum which again I'm
saying is good I mean these it's these
are fantastic institutions that do great
work but we're getting at something
deeper here now to go back to n because
you really see n's influence on Fuko
here in that same text and truth and
lying in a non-moral sense n says that
language is a way to anthropomorphize
the world it is a way to bring the world
under Humanity's Dominion by giving
things names if you if you've read
Robinson cruso one of the first first
things he does when he gets on the
island is name things you got to give it
a name so that it can be understandable
so that it can be
organizable it's my favorite word now so
that it can be uh
containable and so differences are
effaced or they are embraced so long as
the same historical method is used the
same institutions the same media are
used to capture those
differences so history is then quite reactionary
reactionary
against Marx's uh re Revelation that
history is only a total uh of a kind of
capitalist interest being represented
again and again history looks to
discover what unites all those it speaks
of and against n's Revelation that
knowledge is a ruse to conceal power
history looks to uncover the legacy of
rationality so you have all of these
criticisms all these real challenges to
history and history is just marching on
against it so n says n's
like apparently this is a crash course
on n as well one of nich's famous
criticisms is the CR his criticism of
the will to knowledge where for a long
time people believe that they were
Guided by the will to knowledge they
were just trying to make sense of the
world so n goes after Socrates goes
after Plato Socrates goes after Kant
goes after many others where he's like
these people believed that they were
trying to understand the world and
people but what they were really doing
was imposing their own view of the world
onto the world they weren't discovering
anything because they're using language
what truth is there really to be found
in language n asks us and so these
people weren't exercising the will to
knowledge they were exercising the will
to power that is found in all of us this
desire to impose ourselves onto the
Earth and you know the appeal to history
can it can be reactionary in the
abstract ways I've been laying out it
can also be pretty reactionary and
violent in quite concrete ways like a
strange turn to evolutionary psychology
to justify patriarchy to justify male
justify male aggression against uh women
to justify the existence of the
heterosexual binary for example like all
of these things can be explained Away by
pointing to history as being this one
unitary stream of events that has led to
this moment as though that like what a
violence that is to commit to history
like what an amazing violence that is
yet it actually earns the status of like
a science especially with evolutionary
psych that has a lot of scientific
backing quote unquote scientific backing
but as we go on through this book it
might become clear just how difficult
the task is that he's trying to do he's
trying to problematize all these
disciplines by essentially offering us a
discipline that he's calling archaeology
which he's like we need to use their
tools against them we need to use their
tools to identify the very problems
found in each of their approaches but we
can only do that if like if we use their
approaches if we
understand why there are these
discontinuities within history what does
it mean to find a discontinuity or
rupture in history what does that say
about the regulative mechanisms that
have established a zone of of comfort of
intelligibility against which we measure
differences like if history was truly
history everything would just be
different everything would just be its
own radical different thing nothing
could be really reducible to anything
else I mean that isn't that the case
with language at all I mean if we were
truly linguistic beings we would have a
different noun for every single object
we encounter but that's not what we do
we are also beings that love to organize
things and I'm not saying this is the
case just ontologically in who we are as
humans but it has come through through
various efforts to impose an ordering on
the World to comply with transforming
ways in which knowledge is organized
attached to various institutions the way
that knowledge is attached to power in
extracting truth from people's suffering
as they are made to suffer and made to
be test subjects and to be learned from
in the prison this is part of fuko's
other work in the prison in the mental
asylum in uh you know the doctor's
office and so on and he he concludes his
his introduction with a really great
quote cuz he's like I'm going to make
mistakes and there going to be things
about this that I don't agree with in a
few years years so he and so he says uh
leave it to our bureaucrats and our
police to see that our papers are in
order it's one of my favorite quotes
ever I use it all the time not here but
in my life uh yeah like to leave it to
our police and our bureaucrats to make
sure that our that our papers are in
order something that they are well
fitted to do and yeah let's end it off
here closing out the the introduction
next time we'll pick up with part two
which covers chapters 1 through
eight uh and then the next episode will
cover part three final episode will
cover part four yeah if you like what I
did consider donating to one of the
organizations below you can follow me on
other platforms if you'd like and yeah
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