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Ruminations XXVIII: The Archeology of Knowledge and the Certainty of Law

This is the last of a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions. Though each can be read independently of the others, they are intended to be read together and against each other.
All knowledge comes to us loaded with the baggage of its production. Even the simplest insight is encrusted within a matrix of foundational presumptions, understandings, desire, politics and history that shape it in countless ways. Even the simplest fact is encrusted with structure, assumptions and judgments without which they cannot be understood and communicated. And those assumptions, judgments, values inherent in the description and use of knowledge of any sort is fiercely protected against those who "could not be depended on to preserve privilege; nor to affirm once and for all--and God knows it is needed in the distress of today--that history, at least, is living and continuous, that it is, for the subject in question, a place of rest, certainty, reconciliation, a place of tranquilized sleep." (Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language 14 (A.M.Sheridan Smith, trans., New York: Panteon Books, 1972).

The object of any regulatory matrix is in part contained withing the framework for the production of knowledge. It presents in simple and historical form a complex of choices--choices about power distribution, values, and necessary organization--that appear so natural that they may remain unstated, and as unstated, veiled. Discourse, then, tends to start from the point of acceptance of the underlying structure upon which knowledge is produced and maintained. To look too carefully beneath that foundation, is to take oneself out of the reality of the conversations in which knowledge is produced, discourse is effected and power is shared.

Thus it is that law, politics and other forms of organization are very much like sausage. A complex of materials smashed within a thin membrane that gives it shape. We tend to battle over the contents of the sausage, but never about the membrane that gives it shape. But it is the quality and shape and variety of the membrane that counts.

So it is, as one considers everything, form the regulatory matrix for multinational organizations to the multi-tiered structure of systems for the generation and contril of global constitutional values, that one ought to think, if only for a moment, about the choices that have been made for one about the shape of the encasement, before one considers in detail the content of that item. And one can decide whether it is sufficient to be permitted the freedom to choose among contents or whether to participate in the determination of the characteristics of the membrane. My sense is that, given a choice, most select the content over the membrane, and thus give up the foundational power over the production of knowledge to those for whom the other path is open.

Full post as published by Law at the End of the Day on February 28, 2009 (boomark / email).