The Banana Peel Project

Genealogy avoids the search for depth.  Instead, it seeks the surfaces of events, small details, minor shifts, and subtle contours.  It shuns the profundity of the great thinkers our tradition has produced and revered; its archenemy is Plato. (Dreyfus & Rabinow, Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 106)

To write genealogy is to skim along the surface of things.  It does not look for a deeper meaning in the movements of history, but it acknowledges that a lot happens without us knowing about it.  It insists on the arbitrariness of rationalities, but it speaks the language of “categories,” “elements,”  “systems,” “codes,” and “techniques.”  It is the logos of genea, the reason of birth.

Genealogy as logos looks for differences among and within emergences.  Its objects (“events” and “assemblages”) are appearances, productions, positivies.  They are births in the field of thought.  Likewise, sociology as logos looks for differences among and within “societies”; anthropology as logos looks for differences among and within “anthropos” (Dasein or the human); and pharmacology as logos looks for differences among and within drugs, “remedies,” “medicines,” those forces that make us stray from our “general, natural, habitual paths and laws” (Derrida, Dissemination, 70).  In each case, logos is involved in the production of difference, the determination of a field of knowledge.  This is the function of genealogy.

Genealogy watches the interstices between things and thoughts.  It tries to locate the spaces within which problems form at different scales and at different times.  It asks the surprisingly simple question, How is it possible to say that, now?  It locates those spaces between fields of discourse where something new forms: “thought” or “memory.”  It is art, resistance, conscious purpose, a strategic movement with respect to everything in the world that is outside.

It is as if the relations of the outside folded back to create a doubling, allow a relation to oneself to emerge, and constitute an inside which is hollowed out and develops its own unique dimension. (Deleuze, Foucault, 100)

Thought occurs in this space.  And genealogy tries to identify where and how it happens.  From the inside, genealogy carves out a space where it is possible to think something new.

The play of forces in any particular historical situation is made possible by the space which defines them.  It is this field or clearing which is primary. (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 109)

The human ability to build wondrous spaces must be accompanied by an equally wondrous sensitivity to the needs of the other creatures that inhabit those spaces.  These other creatures are critters, coalescences, dreams, thoughts, lives, and words.  We have a responsibility to them and to ourselves.  And in order to behave responsibly, we

have to learn how to look.  You have to open yourself to the data.  TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data.  It opens ancient memories of world birth, it welcomes us into the grid, the little network of buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern…The medium practically overflows with sacred formulas if we can remember how to respond innocently and get past our irritation, weariness, and disgust. (Don DeLillo, White Noise, 51)

The world, our world, is teeming with meaning.  Thoughts and ideas and new encounters constantly scatter across our vision, bewildering flashes of colors and lights that leave us perpetually wondering if we’ll ever find our balance.  This “white noise” seems to lurk at the edge of everybody’s vision.  Maybe that is what we are so afraid of.  Maybe we do have to learn something new, or maybe we have to forget something that we’ve already learned.  Either way, there must be a way of finding our way through the storm, a way of watching and acting that is both wise and innocent.