Aplicación de las δ-endotoxinas de Bacillus thuringiensis para el control de plagas

A brief detour is necessary to clarify what I mean by cultural location and cultural episteme, and how their nuances could coherently subdivide academic disciplines from within. These notions take Foucault’s idea of order as their point of departure, which he defines in The Order of Things:

Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law […] and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language (Foucault [1966] 2005: XXI)

25 _{The notion of ‘cultural location’ is compatible with Bhabha’s (2012) well-known work on the ‘location of}

culture’, in that difference, as a challenge to universalism and essentialism, is given priority over liberalist versions of diversity (Rutherford 1990: 207-211; cf. Žižek 1997). However, for the purposes of this chapter, I place a lesser emphasis on the interstice space of culture as the locus of hybridity, because my interest at this point is the positive ground that enables the possibility of theory building (Foucault [1966] 2005). See below.

Order […] is established without reference to an exterior unit: ‘I can recognise, in effect, what the order is that exists between A and B without considering anything apart from those two outer terms’ (ibid. 59)

The idea that order exists goes beyond merely subsuming items into categories. Rather, it has to do with the fundamental grounds thanks to which classifications make sense at all. Such coherence—the argument goes—relies on a system of elements, defined as the network of relations that orchestrates all entities in the world as an interconnected whole. Only on that basis, can taxonomies be drawn and things be such and such:

A ‘system of elements’—a definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences can be shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be affected, and, lastly, the threshold above which there is a difference and below which there is a similitude—is indispensable for the establishment of even the simplest form of order (Foucault [1966] 2005).

Systems of elements are present in all cultures throughout history, expressed in the human activities they shape. Through them, order comes into being in varying modes. Noteworthy, the definition above is consistent with Foucault’s notion of apparatus as articulated at a later stage of his career. In ‘The Confession of the Flesh’

(1980a), Foucault defines apparatus beyond the limits of discourse, that is, beyond the ‘system of statements within which the world can be known’ (Ashcroft et al. 2007: 62):

What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements (Foucault 1980a: 194).

The fundamental codes of a culture, integral to its own system of elements, govern the patterned structures of language, perception26_{, and action, thus constituting} the empirical order onto which human praxis hinges as a meaningful whole. At the same time, theory reaffirms, explains, and justifies—directly or indirectly—the same system of elements, under the form of scientific and philosophical knowledge. Cultural codes and theoretical discourses feed from and express a given system of elements, an apparatus, as it occurs in a culture at a given point in time (Foucault [1966] 2005: XXII).

An important characteristic of Foucault’s apparatus is that it has strategic objectives, viz. that it has a ‘major function at a given historical moment, that of responding to an urgent need’ (Foucault 1980a: 195). Such a need springs from the very elements of the system. This responsiveness suggests a degree of reflexivity between the

26 _{I understand perception here as the sensuous reception of meaningful units of content. Thus put, the}

perception of an item results not only in the awareness ‘that it is’ but also in the realisation of ‘what it is’ on the basis of a given conceptual framework.

elements themselves and their organised constitution. On the one hand, things certainly acquire their being out of the cultural order in which they are set up; on the other hand, such ordering is sensitive to the thrust of need that things are able to produce. By that token, the collision between the elements of a cultural apparatus ‘as they should be’ and ‘as they are’ remains a possibility. This indicates that the determining power of the cultural codes is not absolute; hence, the eventual divorce between words and things, and the advent of age-framing discontinuities, as described in The Order of Things27_.

Order lends itself to experience not in the positive moment of its expression, when it slips unnoticed with ease, but through negation, when codes and things become estranged in praxis, when the empirical order falls short of ordering power (Foucault [1966] 2005: XXII-XXIII). To say it with an everyday example: computer users would hardly be aware of device drivers unless performance problems indicated they are outdated, case in which not only the problem, but the locus of the problem, reveals its existence. If drivers slip unnoticed, then they are working fine; otherwise, updating may be necessary. Likewise, the shortcoming of the system of elements makes it evident that order exists, and triggers a critical attitude towards its concrete expressions, out of which profound changes and discontinuities occur. The Order of Things intends to trace back those historical discontinuities in the mode of being of order since the 16th _century, which discloses the resulting networks of relations that characterise, following the author, the classical and the modern age.

This archaeological enterprise, as Foucault envisions it, does not account for such discontinuities at all levels of human activity. The concern here is specifically with theoretical reflections. The author introduces the term episteme in this context, to refer

to systems of elements in that vein: ‘what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge […] grounds its positivity’, says Foucault ([1966] 2005: 23). Hence, the quest is for the system of elements behind theory production, for the legitimising apparatus of knowledge, for the historical a priori that makes our world-picture possible, and ultimately, for the diegesis within which science and philosophy render their fruits.

The emphasis of Foucault’s study of episteme, at least in The Order of Things, is on the historical aspect of order and its manifestations, or in other words, in the advent of the ages via epistemological discontinuities. Foucault does not neglect the question of culture, yet even recognising its importance, he concentrates on European culture—with a bend towards Western Europe, and particularly towards France. Ergo, cultural nuances remain unexplored. Differently, I am interested in the transversal dimension of this theory, namely, in the discontinuities that occur among different cultures (and their subsets) running in parallel in present times. Cultural location refers to such transversal variance.

Along those lines, and returning to our argument, let us define cultural episteme as the specific diegesis from which theorisation towers up in a given culture. Following Foucault, I shall characterise it as the positive ground substantiating theory, the ordering power of which derives from the ontological efficacy of the specific cultural codes it subscribes to. Based on this idea, an argument for culturally localised disciplines, with a view to making sense of popular music studies, can be attempted.