Retropost #1495 (7 de marzo de 2007): Paranoia panóptica reticular

A falta de disponer de un panóptico universal, un Aleph o un ansible, una mirilla omnisciente, o una bola de cristal o algo así.... cosa imposible... qué más quisiéramos que  nuestro blog fuese un panóptico invertido, donde todo el mundo nos leyese y estuviese pendiente de nuestros escritos y discurrires vitales. Como la cinosura de todas las webcams del mundo, e imán de paso para la cornucopia publicística de Google. Por suerte tampoco ese deseo nos conceden los dioses, y no tenemos que rogar, de momento, que nos libren del toque dorado y el tocado a juego.

Pero a veces me siento observado.

Si digo que sería una pesadilla llevar un blog muy leído, no es sólo por la experiencia ajena, sino por ligeras alteraciones que produce en la experiencia cotidiana incluso este modesto e inmodesto blog (supuestamente el 95 más leído de Aragón según Alianzo: oye, no está mal entre un millón de posibles blogueros). Vamos, que algunos me leen, y para eso escribo. Y hasta me leen algunos de mi perímetro social presencial, y también para eso escribo, también, aunque no sólo para eso.

Y me refiero a que sí produce una cierta sensación de paranoia no tanto el que me lean, sino el no saber si la gente con la que me cruzo me ha leído o no. Algunos me lo comentan, hasta ahora favorablemente. También me llegan ecos de opiniones desfavorables, claro ("está loco", etc.)—pero esos son indirectos. Mis vecinos presenciales, con poquísimas excepciones, si bien algunos a veces me leen, no comentan nunca en el blog (de hecho no comenta casi nadie, pero vamos, menos que nadie mis conocidos). Creo, vamos: nunca se sabe, como no te dediques a rastrear IPs y maniobras aburridas de esas. En fin, que nunca sabes si es de dominio común lo que acabas de poner en la red o no. Conversas con alguien y no sabes si le estás contando una novedad o repitiéndole un digesto de tu último post. Que finge no haber leído.

Quizá utilicen esa información privilegiada para manipular mi mente. Crearme asociaciones de ideas, que luego convertiré en futuros artículos. Es como cuando te mira un gato, nunca sabes si te está controlando.

Abro el periódico de la Universidad, y ahí aparecen datos de mis últimos paseos por el monte, con Ivo. Hay una sección especial, "De la vida de José Angel García Landa". Otro día, la noticia de que he reventado un sillón en casa. No sé si esto le pasa a todo el mundo. Hay algún reportero que me sigue; hoy todos somos el Hermano Mayor, o hasta el Gran Hermano. ¿Leerán mis alumnos estas chuminadas? ¿Cómo saberlo? Quizá continúe la conversación en el Messenger, en mis tiempos hablábamos bastante de los profesores, y hasta tenían mote algunos; hoy sin duda todo esto deja traza digital. Quizá hasta nos graben con la cámara del móvil mientras damos clase, y los datos pasen a diversas pantallas gigantes, en sitios lejanos. No parará la paranoia, esto va a ir a más.

 Apofenia.

Debería encriptar el blog, o volver al diario en clave, como Pepys, el blog es el diario de la señorita pepis en comparación con un buen diario secreto en clave. Con candado. Escrito en caracteres góticos. Los años que estuve yo escribiendo en cursiva gótica, ahora que me acuerdo.

Tal como está el tema, alguien toma notas de las cosas que digo y hago, sin duda. Es como un detective que te sigue los pasos, un rastreador de rastros en red como el Case de Neuromante.  Hay un archivo sobre mí, que va engordando. Esperan la ocasión propicia, sin duda. Quizá me sigan hasta por la calle, cuando termino de postear, o geolocalizando mi móvil. Necesito un retrovisor. Hay en alguna parte un gráfico complejo de los ordenadores que utilizo; los datos se van acumulando en una base y un programa los analiza impasible, como Dios tomando nota en su pizarrín:

God's philosophical and so can wait
for the blasphemer and the reprobate —
He calmly chalks their crimes up on His slate.

—In that immortal copy
The conscience of us all
Can read without its glasses
On revelation's wall.

El del blog

—oOo—

Panopticon of Topsight on The Order of Things

Or, a perspective on the paradoxical self-transcending of perspectives. A passage from Seán Burke's The Death and Rebirth of the Author, criticizing Foucault's blind or contradictory self-erasure of his own position even as he erases the agency of the author. There are here some implications for a definition of the concept of topsight, understood here not as information on a situation or set of relationships, but as comprehension or conceptual understanding of a field.  It is a topsight-related phenomenon (or should we say a paradox, the topsight paradox) which bears on any discourse of truth, not just archaeology—but is perhaps made more visible or paradoxical here because of archaeology's, and Foucault's, pretensions to erase agency and the subject while simultaneously setting up a theory of knowledge and of the subject as agency. The archaeologist (or Foucault himself) as a "detached overseer", to use Burke's phrase, is uncannily reminiscent of the prison guard's eye in Bentham's panopticon of universal surveillance—a position which, fairly enough, can be occupied by an actual guard or may remain empty, a subjectless position, since the topsight is structurally determined, not an accident of the overseer's volition or personal intention. The panopticon would therefore seem to be a diagrammatic icon of Foucault's discourse at a deeper level than is usually conceived—a regular mise en abyme of the notion of an order of things which can be described from a master discourse alien to it or escaping the frame-breaking countergaze of the Sartrean observer-observed.

More generally, though, we could argue that any discourse which sets itself up as innovative or as the disclosure of a hidden perspective on things (and which critical discourse doesn't set itself up as such?) also posits itself, in so doing, as transcending the present field of knowledge, as opening a perspective on reality as we know it, viewed from another order of things.

Within The Order of Things, more than in any other text, it was necessary for Foucault to deflect attention from his own status as its author. By the very act of constructing the discourse of the prediscursive ground, archaeology indemnifies itself against the system of constraints which it enforces upon all other discourses. The archaeologist will therefore always be a detached overseer. and never part of the discursive configuration itself; as a matter of structural necessity he will be outside of time.

This situation differs with respect to the descriptions of the Classical and modern epistemi, though only to the point of modifying the quality of temporal transcendence which the archaeological discourse implicitly arrogates to its practitioner. Obviously, the description of the Classical era will of necessity take place outside that arrangement of knowledge but neither can it issue from the vantage point of modernity, for Foucault would then be presenting not an understanding of the deepest stratum of Classical thought, but a history of the present as it views the past; an operation in which what are called the elements of Classical thought would be no more than merely material for allegory, for a revaluation of how our modern habits of thought negotiate the long distant past.

Moreover, and more worryingly still, the archaeological discourse of the modern episteme. cannot itself belong to the modern episteme, for then it could only speak for, and not about  the rules of formation for the anthropological arrangement. If it formed a part of the modern configuration, The Order of Things would represent another monument to the anthropological era, to the discourse on man, his destiny and ends. Kant writes of man as the end of all nature, Hegel of the end and fulfulment of man as that mystical journey of mind toward itself in time, Marx of the simultaneous dissolution and beatitude of man in classless society, Nietzsche of the übermensch, Huserl of an ultimate intersubjectivity, Heidegger of the shepherd of Being—there would then be no reason not to see in Michel Foucault's thesis of the-death-of-man-as-the-end-of-man the latest instance of the modern preoccupation with the eschatological horizons of humanity. (59)

Yet Foucault insists that this is not the case. Archaeology is a radical break with anthropologism, it transgresses the limits of this era. What he does not say, however, is that in order to transgress these limits, it must also transcend the formal conditions which dictate to all other discourses the ground and limit of their possibility. The episteme must be described from the point of view of an ideal exteriority. Only from a mystical and privileged continuum alterior to all epistemi can the archaeologist range, circumscribe and re-present discursive history, and only from this place can he proscribe its future (60). Foucault is therefore always already in possession of the transcendence which he bewtows upon Nietzsche for in the last analysis, it is still Foucault who purportedly has unique access to the true historical mission and significance of the Nietzschean discourse, he who has ultimate powers of appropriation within an archaeology of the human sciences which is all his own. His is the discourse of all discourses, the one site from which the rules of formation of four centuries of writing can be revealed. Foucault therefore cannot avoid becoming the author of his own text, and it is precisely the monumental and totalising nature of that text which conspires to make the authority of the archaeologist unconscionably problematic. (61)

The whole range of texts which make more modest or local claims, those which are avowedly impressionistic, fictional or subjective will not imply transcendentally remote authors; rather such a subject tends to arise from high philosophical or theoretical texts, particularly in the case of texts which—like Foucault's, like Hegel's—attempt to tell the truth of history, for such a tale can only be told from the annex of a pure distance, an ahistorical alterity. And where the problems of ideal detachment are grave enough for Hegelian history, they are entirely calamitous for a text which seeks to lay the ghost of the idealist subject. Prime amongst the ironies of Foucault's project is that, even supposing that it had succeeded in its aim, history would still have been left to depose the subject of archaeology. Foucault has little enough success in ousting those authors whose influence he wished to deny. The one subject he could never in principle dislodge is Michel Foucault.

(59) As Jacques Derrida says, 'The thinking of the end of man .... is always already prescribed in metaphysics, in teh thinking of the truth of man.' Jacques Derrida, 'The Ends of Man', Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 109-36; p. 121.

(60). It is perhaps partly for this reason that Foucault maintains a scrupulous uncertainty as to whether we are still (at the time of writing) within the Age of Man, or are instead dazzled by the unaccustomed light of the coming episteme. The space between epistemi is the ideal point from which the archaeologist might speak for it frees him from the specific determinations of any particular configurations of knowledge and forms so to speak, a lyrical intermezzo between rigid, prescriptive systems. Foucault's elusiveness on the epistemic stationing of the archaeological discourse has led Pamela Major-Poetzl to postulate a fourth and contemporary episteme commencing in 1950, though she does so with no direct authorisation from the text. See Pamela Major-Poetzl, Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Western Culture, op. cit., pp. 158-9; 191-5.

(61). And Foucault's style does everything to confirm the transcendental status of the archaeological author. He writes with an omniscient assurance, in tones peremptory and portentous, with what Roland Barthes would call the voice of God. Indeed, Edward Said makes the point that Foucault's voice is undoubtedly the 'voice of an Author', though he sees no particular contradiction in an authorful and authoritarian discourse which recommends the anonymity of discourse. See Edward Said, 'An Ethics of Language', Diacritics vol. 4, no. 2 (Summer 1974), pp 28-37; p. 28.

The Order of Discourse