week 2 summary notes

Today we really got into the difference between the Classical and the Modern episteme and began to look more critically at this problem about the reciprocal relation betweeen discourse and discipline.
Fayes brought into this discussion the intuition that objects of analysis are not discovered so much as produced within a field of knowledge.
Robbie introduced us to a quote that discussed the failure of Representation to capture the complexity of the foundations of life (understood as the intersectoin of work, biology, and language). Matt and others also raised important observations and questions.
Ultimately, what we want to understand is just this idea of the mode of Being common to things and knowledge.
We next embarked on a quick study of the panopticon -- my question here is for next week and which you will all need to submit to the blog discussion the following:
why is the panopticon more "powerful" than the dungeon or the prison as previously understood?
I look forward to your entries.
Please send them by Sunday night so we can review them in class on Monday.
Your next set of readings will be from Quatramere de Qunicy and JNL Durand. I'll try to have these ready by tomorrow
Best
Peter

Discussion 1 Foucault's The Order of Things

There are a couple of fairly important aspects to this text. One of them is the transformation in the way in which organization and order are brought to bear on the nature of Things, and the way in which "organization" is structured by a "discipline" and "discourse" and therefore the type of objects and positivities that emerge there. The primary point is how in the Modern episteme classification went beneath the system of classification to locate a series of "invisibilities" that constituted the nature of things and their relations. This is true for biology, economics, and the study of languages. Two important terms here are function and topology. We'll see how this also plays out in architecture.