Entry #5

Hi all, hope you had a great week at each of your internships. As of right now, my advisor is writing applications to receive monetary aid for her upcoming research/field work in South America this summer, so I've been working on proofreading her essays (for both readability and effect), hoping to help her secure some grant donations for her PhD work. Most of these programs are very selective in terms of who they give money to, so altogether it sounds like a highly stressful process! Nevertheless, I'll be trying my best to make sure it works out well for her. We've been moving forward in The Archaeology of Knowledge. An interesting thing about Foucault is that he likes to never refer to things outright; before nearly everything he alludes to there is a sequence of qualifiers distancing himself from the traditional interpretation of a given word. A quick example: instead of just writing the word "science" he'll choose to acknowledge "the region usually known as science"; on one hand this idiosyncrasy can be tiresome, as it leads to a lot of nebulous propositions difficult for the reader to produce hypotheticals for. But on the other hand, from a structural point of view, it makes a lot of sense: Foucault, in his assessments of how language is set up - his analysis of the assumptions, groupings, metaphors, etc. that we as humans tend to absent-mindedly gap-fill - does not want to fall into the same trap of accepting the definitive nature of any given word or phrase ("definitions" of words are something he has a big problem with! See for example his examination of the evolution of the word "madness"). Thus, he wants to keep his distance from these concepts, these bundles of notions and assumptions that may or may not be tied inextricably to the maintenance of power, i.e., the idea of "correctness" in modern society. Foucault's writing style alone, although often critiqued by scholars for its obscurantist terminologies, has provided me with inspiration for my upcoming writing project. How, in conversational discourse, for instance, do we avoid these outright referrals to something definitive? I was reading James Simon Kunen's The Strawberry Statement earlier (a novel about Vietnam war protests) when I came across the following line, which I found to be quite funny, as well as relevant to my project! He writes: "We youths say 'like' all the time because we mistrust reality. It takes a certain commitment to say something is. Inserting 'like' gives you a bit more running room." (The Strawberry Statement preceded The Archaeology of Knowledge by three years, interestingly enough.)

In other recent news (last week or so), the Chilean division of Greenpeace (a massive international environmental NGO) has pulled a pretty bold stunt relating directly to my project: claiming a legal loophole to create a new state within Chile: the "Glacier Republic." This is a means to bring attention to the lack of legal protection for Chilean glaciers, which account for 82% (!) of S American glacier mass. This lack of protection, argues Greenpeace, amounts to an open invitation for mining companies to negatively impact regions reliant on glaciers for water resources, including one of Chile's most populated areas. This stunt, not unlike the NGO forces compelling the Pascua Lama mining project to be suspended last year, indicates a recent and interesting discursive reorientation towards the role of glaciers in modern society, in subtle contradistinction to the ideas put forth in Carey's book In the Shadow of  Melting Glaciers: rather than framing glaciers as potential dangers to humans, in the vein of catastrophes such as glacial lake outbursts and avalanches, the establishment of the Glacier Republic depicts these bodies of ice as more or less endangered (with their destruction, of course, also negatively impacting those who depend on them for water resources). This recent development has compelled me to dive into one of Carey's essays, "How glaciers became an endangered species," which I'll fill you in on next week. This essay, along with his book, will be key to establishing a more or less chronology containing certain events, at which points the discourse surrounding glaciers was irrevocably altered. I've decided that my short story will be a near-future sort of narrative, depicting a new event at which the glaciers have been discursively (and thus, epistemologically) altered. I'm quite looking forward to it!