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Show 323 CHAPTER 6 REFLECTIONS ON BECOMING CORPORATION "As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility - without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises - were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." - Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 387 "In this new historical formation of the nineteenth century, it is indeed man who is made up from the set of composing forces ‘drawn' from the lottery. But if we can imagine a third draw, the forces of man will enter into a relation with other forces again in such a way as to make up something else that will no longer be either God or man: we could say that the death of man links up with that of God, to create new compounds…We must take quite literally the idea that man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides: he is a composition appearing only between two others, a classical past that never knew him, and a future that will no longer know him." - Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, pp. 88-89 "And yet we live in towns, in crowds, in techniques, in networks, in multiplicity. We've got to get used to that. Either this new existence has broken fractured, scattered and erased former existences, in which case we would be prohibited from seeing ourselves as full and complete beings, for all we'd have left would be a critical mind that had become more and more easy, the crepuscular taste for nostalgia, or an apology for dispersion, destructuring, crumbling, the sado-masochistic pleasure of fragmentation and impotence. Or else it's the other alternative explored in this little sociological opera: we have to change the very vehicle that serves to study totalizations. Yes, there is a common world, full and whole existences, civilizations, but we have to agree to study how totalities are summed up in narrow temporary places where they paint their pictures; and then follow them in the worlds they perform - streets, corridors, squares, words, clichés, common places, standards - ; and, finally, we have to agree to explore how these scattered totalities provide beings, themselves multiple and variable, with ways to gather themselves as coherent wholes. After learning how to wander along these traces, to proportion relations without ever going through the myth of Society, after learning how |
