[FRIAM] Myth of the Given

[Eric Charles]

A totally sensible position: "We can treat just about anything *as if* it
is text, and given the sophistication of our ability to deal with text,
that should lead to some insights."

A totally bullshit position that no one should ever have tolerated for a
minute: "Everything is text."

On Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 12:01 AM jon zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:

> With respect to Foucault, I wish to express gratitude to him for his
> introduction to 'Madness and Civilization'[⛵]. He gives a brief and
> engaging account of how the treatment of madmen in European society
> underwent a notable inversion, and to my unkeen eye, one paralleled in
> both the treatment of garbage and conception of national parks in the
> west. Foucault recounts:
>
> "Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with
> their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners
> because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then "knew," had an affinity
> for each other. Thus, "Ships of Fools" crisscrossed the seas and canals
> of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them
> found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the
> isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse,
> or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which
> had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take
> pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign
> lunatics would dock at their harbors."
>
> In other words, Europe's madmen were relegated to a life of perpetual
> *outside*. But soon for polite Renaissance society, this quickly became
> a nuisance, and leper colonies slowly came to replace their lepers with
> madmen. Inside became the new outside. Similarly, it no longer made sense
> to throw one's slop and filth from the window and into the streets below.
> Comically, Europe took a little longer (the 1800s), than with their
> madmen, to realize that *outside* was just no good[♨]. A paradigm shift
> in the west focused on designating landfills to *contain* and cover
> society's waste. Finally, as the compact manifold, we call Earth bore for
> us no more wilderness to discover, her denizens quickly realized their
> need for it. Special *inside* outsides came to be designated as national
> parks, an outside with an entrance fee, spaces where one pays not to
> re-enter society, but to leave it.
>
> [⛵]
>
> https://monoskop.org/images/1/14/Foucault_Michel_Madness_and_Civilization_A_History_of_Insanity_in_the_Age_of_Reason.pdf
>
> [♨]
> https://www.qmul.ac.uk/geog/research/research-projects/historiclandfill/
>
>
>
> --
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>
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