Flu-ish musings...

October 2

So, I stumbled across a juicy quote while reading “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” from the Foucault Reader:

“History has a more important task than to be a handmaiden to philosophy, to recount the necessary birth of truth and values; it should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes. Its task is to become a curative science.”

While I understand that I am taking this out of context from Foucault’s musings on genealogy and history, this quote resonates with me in relation to my blog from yesterday. It seems Foucault is saying that if history is to avoid an ursprung preoccupation with finding the spider’s ass as a point of origin, if a neatly linear teleological search may be abandoned, then it (history) can become worthwhile…a curative science. Is it too simplistic to say, then, that an account…which may be called a history but might better be called genealogy…could be medicine to the individual who is unsure about her path in or path out of a perceived place in the PhD process? I say account, though the word doesn’t feel appropriate. There is, in this argument, no PATH…no IN and no OUT. Foucault’s introduction to genealogy, if I am understanding it correctly, is a spider’s web. It is an entity with holes, links, ruptures…like speech, it is a site for struggles, invasions and reversals. There’s madness, then in looking for a single point of origin because the point of origin, like the hind-end of the spider, is always moving, sometimes dead, sometimes missing. And because of such things as collisions or occasional gusts of wind, that which seemed to be linear may have become disjointed and stuck to some other branch of the entity which would mean that the spider’s hind-end is some divine myth of origin and searching for it makes a hind-end of the one doing the searching.

So, I’m sitting in a web. Is this herkunft? A network of false appraisal, of deviations, of accidents? Does this mean my idea of failing in my goals as a PhD student comes from an attachment to ursprung…to some myth of progress? Did Foucault free me from an itchy place or am I wildly mis-reading and mis-applying these ideas?

No matter, I like this freeing view of history/genealogy/accounting-for. There’s no starting gun to fire and no finish-line to succeed or fail in crossing.

Now back to my reading…

　
　
PS- In addition to devoting a month to daily blogging, I am also devoting the month to daily recording of nutrition and exercise in the SparkPeople tracker and am going to read daily from Rhonda Byrne's new book while completing her assignments on gratitude.