Notes from Foucault's "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"

Some motifs we should consider as we move forward:

The origin (or myth thereof) vs. the Mask

F: "...there is 'something altogether different' behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemiel fashion from alien forms."

Teleological metahistory as presumed by Christianity (Eden, the garden) vs. a history dependent upon discontinuities, accidents, emergent and lost strands

F: "...to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations -- or conversely, the complete reversals -- the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents."

The mind vs. the body

F: "The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissaciated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration."

As genealogists of "hip," what tools shall we bring with us?

-- disclaiming the existence of a single, essential Origin
-- avoiding teleological explanations
-- accepting that reality is constructed
-- being meticulous as we track the different shifts and movements of "hip"
-- understanding our own role in writing history by being self-reflexive in our approach
-- emphasizing fragmentation, rupture, story instead of truth

Some possible directions:

-- interactive media
-- scrapbooking
-- a Benjaminian "arcades project"