MULTIPLE WORDS

We use multiple words in the spaces of subjects, predicates, verbs, prepositions, or adjectives because our discussion(s) is (are) multiple. It is of many things, responding to many things, open to contingency. Yet we do not say everything at once, do not necessarily include more voices, and we still make an intervention that is particular.

We engage many discussions, many ways of imagining the topic, many vocabularies, to the frustration of perhaps each of them. For it is to each that our lists mark what may be called our disloyalty.

It is confusing and hard to decide which option to take seriously. At my usual reading speed I skip most of the options. Such multiplicity forestalls the making of a clear case, yet the options continue on as a form of knowledge. Hard to remember, useful to quote, good replay value, evasive of rejoinder, less certain, more complex, less comfortable to summarize.

“Deduction” [domination expressed in killing, taking, and demanding] has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.
(Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume One, 136)