The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault)
"Rational discourse is based less on the geometry of light than on the insistent, impenetrable density of the object, for prior to all knowledge, the source, the domain, and the boundaries of experience can be found in its dark presence. The gaze is passively linked to the primary passivity that dedicates it to the endless task of absorbing experience in its entirety, and of mastering it.... The gaze is no longer reductive, it is, rather, that which establishes the individual in his irreducible quality. And thus it becomes possible to organize a rational language around it. The object of discourse may equally well be a subject, without the figures of objectivity being in any way altered. It is this formal reorganization, in depth, rather than the abandonment of theories and old systems, that made clinical experience possible; it lifted the old Aristotelian prohibition: one could at last hold a scientifically structured discourse about an individual" (xiv).
so is the clinical experience based on a fundamental impenetrability of the object or on the assumption of its impenetrability?
i love Glissant's notion of opaquness --"that is, the irreducible density of the other"-- and it forces this consideration: what is the space, and what emerges when we theorize that bridge, between irreducibility and impenetrability?
That cannot be reduced.
1.
a. That cannot be brought to a desired form, state, condition, etc. Const. †into, to.
b. spec. That cannot be reduced to a simpler or more intelligible form; incapable of being resolved into elements, or of being brought under any recognized law or principle. ...
3. Incapable of being reduced to a smaller number or amount; the fewest or smallest possible.
4. That cannot be reduced to submission; invincible, insuperable.
i think what's cool about irreducibility when refracted through Glissant's irreducible density is that it approaches what N. says in Bedouin Hornbook, that there is an "insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion," which is to say, the thing that avoids any moment of origin or birth; there is something previous to any sorta insistence on any point as the moment of origin. density [thickness, closeness of texture, crowded, which is to say, sociality] as irreducible means, for me, the impossibility of being exhausted or evacuated; or it approaches what i believe Heidegger argues about the piece of chalk, that it retains something of itself each time it is broken, that breaking it into halves and quarters and eighths does not reveal, nor extinguish, evacuate, exhaust the thingness of the chalk, but it remains in the pieces.
irreducibility as a concept i think calls for penetration as a means of testing, of experimentation. that is, i conceptually figure irreducibility as a solicitation, an invitation to social experimentation, a social experimentation brought to bear by Glissant.
1. That cannot be penetrated, pierced, or entered; impossible to get into or through. Const. to,by.
2. transf. and fig. Whose nature, meaning, etc. cannot be penetrated or discerned; inscrutable; unfathomable.
impenetrability as a concept, i think, is the preclusion of the possibility of solicitation and invite. if we follow Foucault's path, impenetrability functions as telos, as the grounded assumption of the object that allows for the grasping of or aversion to the object [and maybe, and thus, leading to the rationality that Foucault points out above; rationality as the knowability of things either; density that is impenetrable means that it can no longer be crowded, that nothing else will fit, that it is exhausted, full, no room in the inn (though there was a stable that allowed for birth, miraculous and mythic; so here we can still think about what emerges when this declaration is made), it is enclosed rather than open and this enclosure is what makes its knowability possible: this, of course, is the antithesis to what i think blackness is, as the radical, crowded, dense, social openness to things, to objects, to sharing].
