random nuts and blots

via here, this quote from Foucault:

All my books, be it Madness and Society or this one here [Discipline and Punish], are—if you like—little toolboxes. If people want to open them, and use this or that sentence, this or that idea or analysis as a screwdriver or wrench to short-circuit, dismantle, or explode the systems of power, including perhaps those systems from which these books of mine have emerged—all right, all the better. (16)

.. the temptation to hear ‘Theory’ here.

The ‘toolbox’ metaphor implies of course a pragmatic imperative: use what works – in shedding light on its object, opening up new lines of thought, producing new readings etc. The point is whether the tools are useful rather than true. If the ‘effects’ are interesting, stimulating, etc, then fine. If this does describe much of what is called ‘Theory’, then the argument that Theory draws on epistemologically or logically inconsistent concepts would be wide of the mark; or rather, the argument would have to be that this bracketing off or postponement of the question of truth, its subordination to the criterion of use or effect, was finally not feasible or defensible.

If it is difficult not to think of ‘Theory’ here, it’s also to be reminded (As SEK does) that literary analysis has long since been characterised, and at its very best, by such a ‘toolbox’ approach. And rather than being some defect or quirk, the question is what about the literary object asks for this kind of thinking. This is hardly an original thought, to be sure, but ‘literature’ has been the place where a certain non-systematic, partly mimetic thinking, a thinking which tinkers, invents and steals, has found expression. Or, ‘literature’ is the concession to which such thinking has been confined. (The tool must 'fit' (and know) its object before dismantling it, but does not thereby have to resemble it).

The more recent trend of proper-name tagging perhaps obscures this continuity, and in any case needs to be seen in relation to the institutional conditions of academic production rather than (only) in relation to ‘intellectual history’.

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The ‘toolbox’ metaphor reminded me also of the notion of literary criticism machines – the Iser machine, the DeMan etc,

Sometimes the machine can only be used by its inventor (and this is of interest in itself), sometimes not - we might still encounter someone using a 1982 DeMan, having long-ago ensured his tenure and perhaps drawing new crowds because of the élan with which he handles his now rather antique apparatus. One argument would be that the ‘toolbox’ model has to some extent replaced the machine model. This conveniently recalls the modernism/ postmodernism distinction. However, it doesn’t quite fit the facts.

I think also that the machines themselves were valued for similarly ‘pragmatic’ reasons – for their ability to re-awaken perception, suddenly reconfigure the available literary ‘facts’, produce an ‘intellectual high’, effectively re-invent the text.

Perhaps one could also look at it the other way round, and see the texts themselves as machines – The Hamlet machine has been particularly effective in generating readings, certain strategic or stubborn silences in its design ensure endless copy. Ulysses, of course, and by its own admission, is an apparatus geared to prolonging its own interpretive life.

To my mind the best machines are the ones that give the impression of being bastards – of being generated by the text they interpret, and yet rendering the text new and unfamiliar. (Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka, to some extent). Or rather, it is able to use the text not simply to ilustrate pre-exisitng concepts but to produce new ones.