What does "apophatic" mean?

[sgttomas]

Nope, way more extensively, I meant in BS, Book 2 , Mumbai, but perhaps you haven't cracked that one yet?.( I shall add a quote here ASAP showing how the Easternish concept of "no-self" comes up in psychology as a part of trauma theory.)

Oh...yeah, please do. That sounds interesting.

And yeah, I did start reading Book 2....um....it started off so erotic and so heavy in the psycho-sexual dimension that I found it disturbed me in a way I just wasn't ready to deal with at that time. So I put it down. But knowing where you are going to take the story gives me a way to engage with it again. ....it's sitting right here on my "to read" shelf.

ETA - sorry to hear about your taking a blow, btw!

Thanks. Yeah. Concussion. ....not fun.

....now, just to get even, I shall have to add another quote to that thread - it will be one of Pete Rollins' jokes/stories - -and it should considered for its Foucaldian implications about the nature of "knowledge" - or as Michel would say, pouvoir/savoir

Not familiar to me.... ~*~*runs away to google~*~*

Ah. (I read the quote in the other thread too)

To have power is to determine what IS knowledge?

Okay.... what is THIS all about? (and why is it within a "Knowledge Management" blog!?!?!? What's going on here?!?!??)

http://guruj.net/node/144
The reason that I've posted the original French is that Michael argues translating "pouvoir-savoir" into "power-knowledge" is a poor translation and fundamentally undermines the intent of Foucault's statement.

The reason is quite simple: both pouvoir and savoir are infinitive verbs, implying the potential for action without specifying when the action will take place. Savoir can be translated as "to know", but pouvoir has no similarly simple translation, because "to power" does not capture the intent of possessing power.

On the other hand, "power" and "knowledge" are both nouns, turning actions into objects (that can be possessed). Michael argues that this emphasis on tangibility has been the cause of a lot of misunderstandings in the KM community, and particularly the historical emphasis on codification and capturing knowledge into a computer system, as if creating slices of knowledge under glass is sufficient to translate into "pouvoir" -- having power.

An interesting point of view that I'll be considering for a while.

Why is that the second result in my google search after a Britannica entry????

Peace,
-sgttomas

[met]

....now, just to get even, I shall have to add another quote to that thread - it will be one of Pete Rollins' jokes/stories - -and it should considered for its Foucaldian implications about the nature of "knowledge" - or as Michel would say, pouvoir/savoir

Not familiar to me.... ~*~*runs away to google~*~*

Ah. (I read the quote in the other thread too)

To have power is to determine what IS knowledge?

Okay.... what is THIS all about? (and why is it within a "Knowledge Management" blog!?!?!? What's going on here?!?!??)

http://guruj.net/node/144
The reason that I've posted the original French is that Michael argues translating "pouvoir-savoir" into "power-knowledge" is a poor translation and fundamentally undermines the intent of Foucault's statement.

The reason is quite simple: both pouvoir and savoir are infinitive verbs, implying the potential for action without specifying when the action will take place. Savoir can be translated as "to know", but pouvoir has no similarly simple translation, because "to power" does not capture the intent of possessing power.

On the other hand, "power" and "knowledge" are both nouns, turning actions into objects (that can be possessed). Michael argues that this emphasis on tangibility has been the cause of a lot of misunderstandings in the KM community, and particularly the historical emphasis on codification and capturing knowledge into a computer system, as if creating slices of knowledge under glass is sufficient to translate into "pouvoir" -- having power.

An interesting point of view that I'll be considering for a while.

Why is that the second result in my google search after a Britannica entry????

Peace,
-sgttomas

Dunno! All I can tell you for sure is, according to foucault.info, Michel is now the most-quoted scholar in all the humanities.

Translating the verb pouvoir a little more accurately might help, tho...

Pouvoir is one of the most common French verbs. It is irregular in conjugation and literally means "can" or "to be able to." Pouvoir has different meanings in certain tenses and is found in numerous expressions.

Ability

In general, pouvoir means "to be be able to," usually translated by "can" or "may":

So, like that.... knowledge and power can be seen as always found together, intrinsically linked, and essentially two sides of the same coin? On many levels, of course, & as philosopher-historian, MF tries to trace their co-development historically in an odd bunch of fields, as well in the purely abstract sense in at least one book, and even suggests some of our thought patterns could be rooted in just trivial and petty accidental-historical power-struggles. So he's kinda like Derrida, with D's concepts of linguistic 'traces,' but solider & more concrete, more socio-historical....

[met]

Nope, way more extensively, I meant in BS, Book 2 , Mumbai, but perhaps you haven't cracked that one yet?.( I shall add a quote here ASAP showing how the Easternish concept of "no-self" comes up in psychology as a part of trauma theory.)

Oh...yeah, please do. That sounds interesting.

And yeah, I did start reading Book 2....um....it started off so erotic and so heavy in the psycho-sexual dimension that I found it disturbed me in a way I just wasn't ready to deal with at that time. So I put it down. But knowing where you are going to take the story gives me a way to engage with it again. ....it's sitting right here on my "to read" shelf.


Peace,
-sgttomas

Well, we think that's a pretty sensitive reading, to be disturbed by it, & it's okay, since we're more disturbed by our readers who don't find it AT ALL disturbing, cuz we found the beginning of Bk II to be rather disturbing ourselves. Hopefully, you'll find it "gets better" - i.e. lighter and more optimistic - as it goes along ....or, at least, guardedly and ambiguously so & even if it ultimately raises more questions than it answers

.... but I definitely don't wanna tell you how to read it in advance!

[met]

And here's your quotes, from "Acute Melancholia", an essay collection from Harvard religious studies prof, Amy Hollywood, who studies mostly medieval woman mystics....

The Unspeakability of Trauma, the Unspeakability of Joy

With characteristic perspicuity, in 1996 the art critic Hal Foster noted the ambiguities involved in the theoretical elevation of the category of trauma:

  On the one hand, in art and theory, trauma discourse continues the poststructuralist critique of the subject by other means, for again, in a psychoanalytic register, there is no subject of trauma; the position is evacuated, and in this sense the critique of the subject is most radical here. On the other hand, in popular culture, trauma is treated as an event that guarantees the subject, and in this psychologistic register the subject, however disturbed, rushes back as witness, testifier, survivor. Here is indeed a traumatic subject, and it has absolute authority, for one cannot challenge the trauma of another: one can believe it, can identify with it, or not.

In trauma discourse, then, the subject is evacuated and elevated at once. And in this way trauma discourse magically resolves two contradictory imperatives in culture today: deconstructive analysis and identity politics. This strange rebirth of the author, this paradoxical condition of absentee authority, is a significant turn in contemporary art, criticism, and cultural politics.

The historian Dominick LaCapra, in a series of important essays on the role of trauma theory and testimonial in the writing of history, points to an uncanny parallel between contemporary theoretical and historiographical discussions of trauma and what he calls “negative theology.” What worries LaCapra is what he describes as “an important tendency in modern culture and thought to convert trauma into the occasion for sublimity, to transvalue it into a test of the self or of the group and an entry into the extraordinary. In the sublime, the excess of trauma becomes an uncanny source of elation or ecstasy” ... LaCapra goes on to claim that even such events as the Holocaust or the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki “may become occasions of negative sublimity or displaced sacralization".

... Have pain and violence and anxiety become the real, to the exclusion of all else? And what does that mean for how we listen to one another? For who we determine to be worth listening to? For what we can hear from them or deem worthy of our attention?

What I want to [raise is] ... the possibility that joy might also be the site of an unspeakable real. At the same time, I want to ask why we believe in the realness and the truth of the traumatic—its properly historical truth—but seem unable to hear joy.

[sgttomas]

Wow. Yeah. Lots of thoughts on this. Have to compose myself

-sgtt

[met]

Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.

—Judith Butler, Precarious Life

[sgttomas]

Heheh. Well done.


...."We have an interesting political predicament, since most of the time when we hear about "right", we understand them as pertaining to individuals, or when we argue for protection against discrimination, we argue as a group or a class. And in that language and in that context, we have to present ourselves as bounded beings, distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law, a community defined by sameness. Indeed, we had better be able to use that language to secure legal protection and entitlements. But perhaps we make a mistake if we take the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about. Although this language might well establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it fails to do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, and implicate us in lives that are not our own, sometimes fatally, irreversibly....Bodily autonomy, however, is a lively paradox." (ibid ???? "Undoing Gender"...hmmm....seems an entire paragraph is shared between those two books)

Then, paraphrasing, "But, oh, never mind that. Continue on with the gender/identity politics."

(did I miss something???)

.... seems to fit in with the Knowledge-Power dynamic.

-sgtt

[sgttomas]

Well, we think that's a pretty sensitive reading, to be disturbed by it, & it's okay, since we're more disturbed by our readers who don't find it AT ALL disturbing, cuz we found the beginning of Bk II to be rather disturbing ourselves. Hopefully, you'll find it "gets better" - i.e. lighter and more optimistic - as it goes along ....or, at least, guardedly and ambiguously so & even if it ultimately raises more questions than it answers

.... but I definitely don't wanna tell you how to read it in advance!

Not at all. That actually helps. I mean...I GOTTA find out whodunit!!!

-sgtt

[sgttomas]

.... knowledge and power can be seen as always found together, intrinsically linked, and essentially two sides of the same coin? On many levels, of course, & as philosopher-historian, MF tries to trace their co-development historically in an odd bunch of fields, as well in the purely abstract sense in at least one book, and even suggests some of our thought patterns could be rooted in just trivial and petty accidental-historical power-struggles. So he's kinda like Derrida, with D's concepts of linguistic 'traces,' but solider & more concrete, more socio-historical....

Well.....um......of course????

Here's another personal anecdote. Probably related. (Edited to add: there are probably some logic gaps in this, but I didn't have time to finely craft something)

I've really struggled with the dimension of religion that necessarily requires one to submit, not to God, but to someONE who has to be the intermediary simply because I lack the knowledge. I have a LOT of hesitations about giving someone that power over me. I have no reason whatsoever to doubt the sincerity and love of the person for me, but...Billy Graham was a genuinely nice guy, too, and I stood on stage with him (true!) and gave my life to Jesus. Okay, so that's the simple story that I have told people. The more complex version goes: that I actually hesitated a lot to go up on the stage. It felt manipulative. But I was (err....am) the son of a preacher, and THAT'S WHAT PREACHER'S SONS HAVE TO DO, RIGHT!?!? I didn't attend the event with my parents, actually, but with a couple from my Dad's church....which just made the social pressure WORSE, frankly.

So I have been stuck in a sort of limbo for a few years now where I have reached a certain limit beyond which I would either need to devote my life to full-time study of the religion, or else have to enter into a relationship of power-knowledge with someone, or else....I guess just struggle along somewhat aimlessly.

I have discussed this with a few other people. One interesting topic of our discussion was around how it's much easier to subjugate one's self to a dead person (through their writings). And actually this is how things have played out. My "spiritual" development, if any has occurred, has been largely in the company of a small group who study the teachings of Said Nursi (who was by all accounts a remarkable person and the fountainhead of much of the spiritual revival of the Turks).

There are two things that I play this off against.

1) I got married. (and I love my wife and I have - by any standard - a great marriage)
2) In the end, my trust is in God, and I can always back out again if things go wrong down the road (this is PAINFUL....but....well....dammit, isn't that what we MUST face in life?? Nowhere to hide)

Peace,
-sgttomas

[met]

Heheh. Well done.


...."We have an interesting political predicament, since most of the time when we hear about "right", we understand them as pertaining to individuals, or when we argue for protection against discrimination, we argue as a group or a class. And in that language and in that contextradox , we have to present ourselves as bounded beings, distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law, a community defined by sameness. Indeed, we had better be able to use that language to secure legal protection and entitlements. But perhaps we make a mistake if we take the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about. Although this language might well establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it fails to do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, and implicate us in lives that are not our own, sometimes fatally, irreversibly....Bodily autonomy, however, is a lively pa(ibid ???? "Undoing Gender"...hmmm....seems an entire paragraph is shared between those two books)


-sgtt

Yeah, seems to be, and it's a lovely one from Butler, whom I usually admire more for her cool & rather detached clarity - & sometimes brutally so, given some of the subject matter she covers ...eta: and yeah, she's very Foucauldian, & beholding to MF....

Now, bringing it back to apophatism, Catherine Keller theologizes the Butlerian idea thusly...with help from a 13th-century beguine/mystic/poetess...

In the Infinite

I reach

for the Uncreated

I have touched it,

it undoes me

wider than wide

Everything else

is too narrow

You know this well

you who are also there

—Hadewijch II, “All Things"

..... What makes action ethical will not then be the imposition of a law or application of a code, however uprightly progressive. It will be the self-implication of the agent in the act itself. The ethical action requires an actualization of ethos as attention to the sociality, human and not human, that constitutes you. Doing unto others what you would want them, under comparable circumstances, to do to you, lacks deontological or legal purity. For in its cultivation it does not deny or master the self’s desire. It widens it. “Everything else is too narrow.”

At a certain pitch, then, the ethical connectivity appears nonseparable from the expansive unfolding of a singular self: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” [Whitman] Or as Hadewijch puts it, in the prior stanza of the poem cited earlier:

All things

Are too small

To hold me.

I am so vast.

Only the infinite envelopes her own impossible immensity. (Really impossible this is a thirteenth-century woman.) But then the apophatic affect of the poem immediately deflates—or dispossesses—any ballooning ego: “it undoes me, wider than wide.”

Excerpt From: "Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement" by Catherine Keller.

ETA:

Our repetitive congealings may be, under normal, sub-zen circumstances, very close to inevitable. But there remains amidst them the possibility that I might not narrow in defensive unification. Casting ego on the waters, I flow forth manifold, a plurisingularity. Not because I have captured the other as my own self, not because I have discarded myself, but because myself, replete with others, becomes more: “I am so vast.” Butler puts this widening with care: “I do not augment myself with my virtuousness when I act responsibly, but I give myself over to the broader sociality that I am.”³⁷

That breadth that I am—a vastness after all—so far from inflated, is that of a self dispossessed of the unitary ego

Excerpt From: "Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement" by Catherine Keller