The Melting World

I spent some time today reading some works by Giorgio Agamben, a contemporary philosopher. He talks about finding the Entivicklungsfahigkeit in a work as his vocation as a scholar. This, he explains, is a term coined by Feurerbach that means the philosophical element in any work is an element that allows the capability of it to be further developed. It is, again in his idea, the unsaid, the undeveloped, or the potential for further thought–which Coleridge called the ‘ignorance’ of the creator/author left to be discovered by the audience.

I also learned a bit more about Foucault’s concept of the panopticon, which becomes his archetype or paradigm, for institutions of power, such as prisons and mental institutions, or as Agamben later argues, for concentration and refugee camps and ‘terrorist’ detention centers.

A panopticon, according to its originator, an Irishman by the name of Jeremy Bentham, it meant a design for an inspection house that would have one central figure watching and controlling the captured ‘inmates’ (1791), but Foucault saw this proposed building as the paradigm for the system of power that, once in place, operates as the control center of the power force and its individual players merely act out the designated (and defined) roles of warden and inmate. Thus, any singular historical phenomenon or object or person might be a paradigm (or example or symbol) for the larger world, and in this instance the panopticon is the model for a mechanism of power or for ‘panoptism.’

More later, but he also talks about the refugee as being the central figure (again, a paradigm) for the postmodern world. Interesting stuff (to me…), as in some ways, I fit his definition of a refugee, at least in the sense that I am someone who often chooses and prefers to be outside of the nation-state.