Assignment 1

Starring a Text:

1) Of Other Spaces * Is he referring to a space outside of where his audience is presently? Or does he instead imply that the spaces he will speak of are completely outside the realm of human understanding? It could be possible he may even talk about “other space” as outer space which would be an interesting way of differentiating the space two spaces despite the fact that they are inherently one and the same.

2) The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermaldynamics- * I would assume that by thermaldynamics Foucault is referring to thermodynamics. Following this logic it is assumed that he is talking about the second principle of thermodynamics, one that outlines entropy, a constant move from order to disorder. An attempt must be made at understanding what he refers to as “mythological resources.” If the phrase is to be taken literally we can say that the source material for mythology during the 19^th century was somehow tied to entropy. However, for most the word “mythology” does not signify the 19^th century, it instead signifies ancient Greek or Roman mythology. Therefore Foucault must be addressing something else. It must be instead that he is referring to entropy itself as the myth of the 19^th century.

3) The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space * How can only the present time be the time of space? Space and time are intertwined in what has been labeled as the space-time continuum. ** Referring to the present as the “epoch of space” forces one to wonder what happened during the time before space. Will there be time after space? In this sentence Foucault has disassociated time and space. Dissociating the two calls into question the irreversibly linear notion of time. If there was a time before space then there must also be a time after space at which point the space that we live in will no longer exist. So if space has a beginning and an end, it can be thought of as anything else that has a beginning and an end. The street you drive your car down has a beginning and it has an end. You, the driver of your car are free to drive forwards or, perhaps illegally, drive backwards along this road. What is to prevent space itself from moving however it desires forwards and backwards along its own road or timeline, just as we are capable of moving freely within our own space? Take a one-dimensional object on a line. In this case as the line moves along a plane it experiences changes, the one-dimensional being would consider these changes that occur as it moves alone the plane to be time passing. But is “time” in the sense that we define it really going by? What a one-dimensional being would consider to be the entirety of its existence a two-dimensional being would consider as an instant in its own concept of time. A moment in time is the instant at which everything in the universe takes place, but at the next instant, is the previous instant really replaced and gone forever? In a two-dimensional universe, this instant would be a massive plane. As the instants of time proceed in two dimensions, the plane changes and defines a new plane. As the successive planes are stacked the two-dimensional universe’s concept of time unravels and a three dimensional space is defined. Even though the two-dimensional universe exists in three-dimensions, a two-dimensional being cannot step out of the plane of its own existence and peer down at a moment (a plane) of “two-dimensional time” and watch it unravel. But couldn’t a human, a three-dimensional being look around in this three dimensional space defined by the two dimensional universe’s passing of “two-dimensional time” and see the beginning middle and end of its existence? So as “time” went by each successive instant of two-dimensional time did not replace the previous, it merely built upon it. Now extend this analysis another step. Every moment in the three-dimensional universe is a cube, sphere, or whatever three-dimensional object you like. As time as we know it unravels this three-dimensional space changes and a new space is defined. So isn’t the entirety of the existence of the three-dimensional universe defining a four-dimensional space? To this end, every moment of time that happened before, and every moment of time that has yet to come, already exists in this four-dimensional space.

4) We are in the epoch of simultaneity * so while we exist in our moment of three-dimensional time, every other moment of three-dimensional time is happening simultaneously. Every moment from the big bang, the “bottom,” so to speak, of the four-dimensional space, all the way to the end of the universe, the “top,” if you will, of the four-dimensional space. If this is the case, could not a four-dimensional being look around in this entire space defined by our concept of time and see the beginning middle and end? Could this being not move freely around in this four-dimensional space? The frightening consequence of this idea is that it subjects to the concept of fate. If everything we have yet to experience is already defined in a four-dimensional space-time then we really have no say in our decisions, they have already been made for us.

5) we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment. * We are merely a consciousness that connects consecutive instants of the three-dimensional universe; the result of these consecutive instants of three-dimensions is what defines who we are and our understanding of time.