Foucault The Legacy Edited by
Clare O'Farrell
Photographs by Richard O'Farrell
Queensland University of Technology
First published in 1997 in book form by Queensland University of Technology Victoria Park Road Kelvin Grove, Qld Australia 4059 First published as a CD-ROM in 2002. Compilation, editorial matter and Introduction copyright © Clare O’Farrell © Individual authors retain copyright of their work. Photographs on jacket and on section dividers copyright © Richard O’Farrell
ISBN 1 86435 567 0
Design by O’Farrell, Lesley Cassidy, Jean Hilton Photos scanned by Vivienne Wilson and Clare O’Farrell Jacket design by Clare O’Farrell and Vivienne Wilson Printed in Brisbane by QUT Publications and Printing
Copies of this book can be ordered from: Clare O’Farrell School of Cultural and Language Studies QUT Victoria Park Road Kelvin Grove, Qld Australia 4059 Fax: +61 7 3864 3728 email:
[email protected] website: http://www.foucault.qut.edu.au CRICOS No. 00213J
Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................... ix Textual Note ........................................................................................... x Introduction ........................................................................................... 1 Foucault: A View from the Antipodes
Clare O'Farrell .................................................................................................... 1
Part One: Literature and History ..................................................... 11 Sade as a Figure Of Radical Modernity: Making-and-Breaking the History of Sexuality
Peter Cryle ......................................................................................................... 12 Foucault/ Artaud: The Madness of the Oeuvre
Edward Scheer ................................................................................................... 17 Eleutheromania: Freedom and Surveillance in Beckett and Foucault
Anthony Ulhmann ............................................................................................ 27 The Memoir, The Corpse and the Bad Judge: Foucault and Bataille
Shane Wilcox ..................................................................................................... 38 The Body and Violence: The Subject of Knowledge in Dostoesvky's The Brothers Karamazov and Foucault's Analytic of Finitude
Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover ................................................................................. 46 Foucault and New Historicism in Literary Studies
Claire Colebrook ................................................................................................ 57
Part Two: Australian History: Art, Science and Government .... 63 History and the Painted Landscape in Mid-Nineteenth Century South Australia
Russell Staif.f...................................................................................................... 64 Foucault's 'Statement' and Paradigm Change in Nineteenth Century Australia
Mary Mackay .................................................................................................... 80 Governing at a Distance: the Colonisation of Australia
Gavin Kendall .................................................................................................... 90 Foucault, Ideology and the Social Contract in Australian History
Geoff Danaher .................................................................................................. 104
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Part Three: Art, Architecture and Cities ....................................... 111 Art, Politics and the History of Change
Thomas Wallgren ............................................................................................ 112 A Panoptic Art History? The Dilemma of Context
Andrew McNamara ........................................................................................ 121 'Making Facile Gestures Difficult': Artists, Criticality, and the Politics of Publicness
Rob Garrett ...................................................................................................... 128 Foucault's Gaze
Jean Hillier ....................................................................................................... 139 'Architectural Irregularities': Discourse and Technique in a Foucauldian History of the Picturesque Cottage
John Macarthur ............................................................................................... 155
Part Four: Philosophy ...................................................................... 175 The Ethics of Singularity in an Era of Complete Nihilism
Mika Ojakangas ............................................................................................... 176 An Exegesis of the Text Was ist Aufkliirung? Foucault's Intellectual Testament
Jorge Davila ..................................................................................................... 185 Clutter and Glitter: Foucault and the Writing of History
Andrew Thacker .............................................................................................. 192 Foucault, Politics and the Performative
Patricia Moynihan .......................................................................................... 202 The Subject of Foucault
Michael Janover ............................................................................................... 215 Foucault, Dialogue and the Other
Chris Falzon .................................................................................................... 227 Atrocity Mechanics: Is there a Logic to Modern Inhumanity?
Paul Alberts ..................................................................................................... 235 The Disorder of Things: Foucault and Comic Writing
Tony Schirato .................................................................................................. 244 Beyond Power /Knowledge, or Towards Erasing the Distinction Between the Discursive and Non-discursive
George Petelin ................................................................................................. 248 Foucault's Sublime: E-Mail to Postumius Terentianus
Philip Barker .................................................................................................... 257
Contents
Part Five: Psychoanalysis ................................................................ 265 Foucault, Hegel, Psychoanalysis and Anthropologies of Truth David Holmes .................................................................................................. 266 Cathexis: Metaphorics of Power Tony Thwaites ................................................................................................. 279
Part Six: Feminism ............................................................................ 287 Foucault's 'Care of the Self': Some Implications for Feminist Politics Maya Lloyd ...................................................................................................... 288 Feminist History After Foucault Gail Reekie ....................................................................................................... 298 Poststructuralism, Feminism and the Question of Rape: Rethinking the 'Desexualisation' Politics of Michel Foucault Kylie Stephen ................................................................................................... 309 Brand News: Using Foucault to Theorise Rape, the Media and Feminist Strategies Chris Atmore ................................................................................................... 321 Normalising Equality: Surveillance and the 'Equitable' Public Servant D. H. Jones ...................................................................................................... 334
Part Seven: Truth, Law and Medicine .......................................... 345 The Production of Truth: Body and Soul Part 1: 'Telling Truths': Truth Telling in the Judicial Process Dirk Meure ...................................................................................................... 346 The Production of Truth: Body and Soul Part 2: Displaying the Truth of the Body Randall Albury ................................................................................................ 356 Legal Language As Discursive Formation Christine Higgins ............................................................................................ 361
Part Eight: The Art of Government ............................................... 373 'Liberalism' and Government: Political Philosophy and the Liberal Art of Rule David Burchell ................................................................................................ 374 A Political Ontology Mitchell Dean .................................................................................................. 385 Culture and Utility: Calculating Culture's Civilising Effect Tony Bennett ................................................................................................... 398 What Is An Expert?
f. P. Minson ..................................................................................................... 405
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Computers and Governmentality in Australia's Department of Social Security
Paul Henman ................................................................................................... 418 Governing Chinese Bodies: The Significance of Studies in the Concept of Governmentality for the Analysis of Birth Control in China Gary Sigley ...................................................................................................... 429 A Foucauldian Genealogy of Income
Ratnam Alagiah and Michael Gaffikin ........................................................... 447 'This Is Not A Prison': Foucault, The Panopticon And Pentonville
John Pratt ........................................................................................................ 462
Part Nine: Management Studies .................................................... 483 Foucault, Power, Social Theory and the Study of Organisations
Stewart Clegg .................................................................................................. 484 Foucault and Management Studies: Post-critical critique? Shayne W. Grice .............................................................................................. 492
Part Ten: Public Relations ............................................................... 499 Constructing Publics: Foucault's Power/ Knowledge Matrix and the Genealogy of Public Relations and Press Agentry
P. David Marshall ........................................................................................... 500 The Role of Public Relations in Empowering Groups and Institutions: A Study
Elizabeth Logan ............................................................................................... 507 Women Politicians: Media Objects or Political Subjects?
Judy Motion ..................................................................................................... 518
Part Eleven: Policing the Environment ........................................ 529 Governing the Environment: the Programs and Politics of Environmental Discourse
Ade Peace ......................................................................................................... 530 Policing Nature: Ecology, Natural Science and Biopolitics
Paul Rutherford ............................................................................................... 546
Part Twelve: The 'Third World' and Postcolonialism .............. 563 Pastoral Power: Foucault and the New Imperial Order
Patricia Stamp ................................................................................................. 564 The Colonial Legacy of Regulating 'Third World' Women as the Alluring 'Other'
Parlo Singh ...................................................................................................... 571
Contents
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Part Thirteen: Education .................................................................. 591 Personal Autonomy As An Aim of Education: a Foucauldian Critique James Marshall ................................................................................................ 592 Ethics, Technics, Politics: Australian Debates on Competencies and Citizenship Denise Meredyth ............................................................................................. 603 Competency-Based Training- Taylorism Revisited? Bert Wigman ................................................................................................... 614 'This Slender Technique': Examining Assessment Policy Daphne Mead more .......................................................................................... 620 Michel Foucault, Dorothy Heathcote, Drama and Early Childhood Kathleen Warren ............................................................................................. 631 Reconceptualising Parent and Child Conflict: A Foucauldian Perspective Susan Grieshaber ............................................................................................. 639 Power Relations in Pedagogy: An Empirical Study Based on Foucauldian Thought Jennifer M. Gore .............................................................................................. 651 Beyond The Panopticon: Accounting For Behaviour In Parent-Teacher Communications Jayne Keogh ..................................................................................................... 664 Disciplining Students: The Construction of Student Subjectivities Barbara Grant .................................................................................................. 674
Part Fourteen: Health and Nursing ............................................... 685 Foucault Had to Die Shamefully Michael Bartos ................................................................................................. 686 The New Morality: Public Health and Personal Conduct Alan Petersen .................................................................................................. 696 The Rhetoric of Health Care? Foucault, Health Care Practices and the Docile body - 1990s style Julianne Cheek and Trudy Rudge ................................................................... 707 Using Foucauldian Ideas to Analyse a Problem Concerning Women and the Environment Elaine Stratford ............................................................................................... 714 The Health of Our Children: A National Efficiency Framework for a Nation Janet Schmitzer ................................................................................................ 723
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Foucault and Gerontological Knowledge: The Making of the Aged Body Stephen Katz .................................................................................................... 728 Action Research in a Nursing Home: Theorising Critical Incidents Arising from Action Through a Foucauldian View of Institutional Power Sue Crane ........................................................................................................ 736 Toward a Critical Ontology: Nursing and the Problem of the Modern Subject Kim Walker ...................................................................................................... 743
Repositioning the Nurse Suzanne Goopy ................................................................................................ 755
Part Fifteen: Marketing Foucault ................................................... 765 The Name of the Author Clare O'Farrell ................................................................................................ 766 Condensing Foucault Alec McHoul ................................................................................................... 771
Contributors ....................................................................................... 783
Acknowledgments
The writings in this volume were originally presented as papers at a conference titled Foucault: The Legacy which took place at the beach resort of Surfer's Paradise in Australia in July 1994. I would like to express my gratitude here to all those who helped in the organisation of that conference. The French Embassy and Queensland University of Technology provided financial assistance and I wish to acknowledge, in particular, the generous support of Gerard Guillet and Francis Etienne at the French Embassy in Canberra. Canon and Xerox contributed towards printing costs for the conference. I would also like to thank my colleagues at QUT in the School of Cultural and Policy Studies and the Department of Continuing Professional Education, in particular, Margaret Johnston, Lesley Cassidy and Michelle Dwyer. Many others were also most generous with their time and help in organising various aspects of the conference, in particular staff at the Ramada Hotel, Ozaccom, Roger Mackell, manager of Gleebooks in Sydney and Nicholas Tsoutas, Director of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 1994. In the production of the current volume, I am indebted to my typists Lesley Cassidy and Jean Hilton for their persistence through what seemed at times to be an endless task. I also wish to thank my family, in particular my mother, to whom I owe the original idea for the conference, as well as friends and colleagues for the encouragement which has helped me finally bring this book to completion. The photographs by my brother Richard which appear on the front cover and on the pages dividing the sections of the book were exhibited at the conference.
Textual Note Every effort has been made to establish a minimum level of consistency with regards to references and footnotes, but given the wide diversity of disciplines represented in this volume, different conventions have been retained in individual papers.
Introduction Foucault: A View from the Antipodes
An intellectual itinerary It was in 1978, as a young undergraduate, that I first came across Foucault.l
The item in question was an article titled 'The position of Cuvier in the history of biology'2 set and specially translated by one of the tutors, Paul Foss for a course in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales. Fascinated by the extreme difficulty of the piece, I decided that I would take up the challenge of writing a paper on it. If difficulty is sometimes no more than a facade to hide an inner void, the analysis of this article by Foucault revealed a type of thought strikingly attractive in its combination of extreme orderliness and brilliant intuitive insight, providing as it did an entirely new and excitingly different point of view on familiar scenery. The effect was similar to viewing those reversible diagrams so cherished by psychologists. The next work of Foucault's which I tackled, this time in a course on methodology, was The Archaeology of Knowledge.3 Having digested this further and much larger cocktail of anarchic insight and rigorous order, I was hooked. I would write my honours thesis on Foucault. At the time, it was considered a radical move to undertake academic work on a thinker who was still very much alive particularly one with such unorthodox views on method and the history of thought. But my supervisors in the Schools of French and History and Philosophy of Science, in particular Randall Albury, were keenly supportive and Foucault certainly seemed far more exciting and daring than the other alternatives I had been toying with- Gaston Bachelard and Henri Bergson. Added to this, was the enjoyable prospect of being able to write and deliver papers on ideas which genuinely shocked and outraged a large part of the older academic establishment. Indeed, in the late seventies in Australia, as elsewhere in the English speaking world, only a small number of people had even heard of Foucault and fewer still were inclined to take his work seriously. A small group of academics in Sydney were notable in this regard: they included Paul Patton, Meaghan Morris, Paul Foss, Randall Albury and George Alexander. In 1979, some members of this group published the first book to appear in English on the subject of Foucault's work that was not purelyacollectionofFoucault'sownwritings.4 Thebookwaslaunchedwith a series of three papers by Paul Patton, George Alexander and myself to an unexpectedly large gathering of about 150 people at the University of Sydney. Paul Patton also ran a small reading group on Discipline and Punish at the same university with an audience whom I found fascinating by virtue
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of the quite irrelevant fact that they all, to a man and a woman, (myself excepted) would carefully 'roll their own' as discussion progressed, as if in confirmation of that long association of French theory and unfiltered tobacco so perennially evident in photographs of any gathering of French intellectuals. The best known photograph of Althusser shows him cigarette in mouth and Sartre's pipe was famous. And, as I would discover later myself, intellectual luminaries such as Gilles Deleuze, lecturing at the radical university of Paris VIII-Vincennes, would be scarcely visible from the back of the room, so thick was the veil of smoke. An excellent article by Jean-Claude Guedon,s which commented at length on the reception of Foucault and French thought by English speaking critics prompted me to formulate the idea of comparing the French and English language receptions ofFoucaultthrougha rigorous application ofFoucault's own archaeological method. Thus it was, armed with this project, that I made my first trip to France during the Australian university summer vacation of 1978. Having procured a card to the Bibliotheque Nationale, through the kind offices of Judith Robinson-Valery, I assiduously haunted the half empty and luxuriously spacious periodicals reading room as well as the far less empty and less spacious library at the Sorbonne, consulting what were at the time, deliciously untouched issues of French literary and philosophical magazines, journals and newspapers dating from 1960. I also attended Foucault's lectures at the prestigious research institution where he held a chair, the College de France. At the beginning o£1979 he was running a course titled 'The birth of biopolitics'. These courses ran in the famous 'salle 8', host to so many other intellectual mandarins since the days of Henri Bergson at the turn of the century. The atmosphere at these events was extraordinary. In order to get a decent seat, one had to turn up half an hour before the lecture began, no mean feat for a lecture beginning at 9 am on a cold Parisian winter's morning. If one turned up even slightly late, one was obliged to sit in another theatre and listen to the words of the master broadcast through a loud speaker. The table at which Foucault sat would be crowded with tape recorders (my own included!) and a small group of young men (never young women) would sit literally and religiously at his feet around him on the rostrum. The audience would listen with all the attention and reverence usually accorded to a great sage or celebrity as Foucault deployed an impressive array of arcane historical detail in support of his latest theses. The material Foucault dealt with in these lectures and in the later courses which I attended in the early eighties was difficult and his delivery, seated behind a table, was devoid of dramatic flourish apart from an occasional expressive hand gesture. Yet, he held the audience enthralled with his obvious absorption in and enthusiasm for his subject matter as well as with his sheer intellectual brilliance. Much comment has been made about Foucault's appearance- his ugliness, his interesting baldness, the steel tooth (a legacy of social security dentistry) revealed by a wide attractive smile, but few have commented that the overall impression was of a man to whom the body was in some senses supremely unimportant- a vehicle wholly subordinated to mind and intellect, to be mobilised in support of a ferocious and keen intellectual curiosity. For all his theoretical discussion of 'the body', I
Introduction
3
was left with the impression after those lectures in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Foucault's interest in the body was just that- theoretical- another interesting intellectual problem to be solved. The other striking feature of these lectures was the extraordinary and all pervasive undercurrent of irony of the most subtle kind. 6 Yet the audience seldom laughed - perhaps it was fearful of disturbing the religious atmosphere of reverence and worship that a high priest in so hallowed institution as the College de France was able to command. In 1980, emboldened with the success of my honours thesis on Foucault I enrolled in a Ph.D. in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. 7 My supervisor, Eugene Kamenka, head of the History of Ideas Unit, was doubtful about my selection of topic. 'Are you sure there is enough material for a doctorate on Foucault?' he enquired politely. The revelation of my thesis topic in the Coombs tea room to various enquirers produced strong reactions. One senior academic turned away in disgust over his tea and biscuits with a contemptuous exclamation of'oh my God!' Foucault was seen as a highly dubious entity- French, tricky, complicated, hard to understand, empirically unsound, possibly a fraud and almost certainly tainted by that unspoken nemesis of sensible Anglo Saxon Protestant thought, European Roman Catholicism. A year later, undaunted by such hostility and armed with scholarships from both the Australian and French governments, I travelled to France where I was to enrol at the radical University of Paris VIII-Vincennes, where Foucault had briefly held the foundation chair of Philosophy in 1969-1970. The occupier of that chair in 1981 was France's leading historian of philosophy and Hegel expert, Fran~ois Chatelet, who was to be my supervisor. Chatelet was a mine of behind-thescenes information on recent French intellectual history and was scathingly brilliant in his criticism of received intellectual dogmas of all kinds. This critical spirit remained unimpaired throughout his long struggle with emphysema until his death in 1985. 8 Every week he would front up to his seminar at the university slightly weaker and thinner, until his doctor advised him that the thick pall of tobacco smoke that was de rigueur at any large seminar at Vincennes was no longer to be tolerated. One of these smoked filled seminars, with floor almost ankle deep in cigarette butts and disposable coffee cups, was memorable for his response to a student who asked in the best tradition of post 1968 rejection of professorial authority why he, Chatelet, persisted in smoking if he was so seriously ill. Chatelet, magnificent pedagogue as he was, took the opportunity to respond with a witty and erudite lesson on the philosophy of Epicurius. He would rather, he said in essence, live a short enjoyable life (Chatelet was also a noted gourmet) than lead along puritanical existence. Unable to teach at Vincennes, Chatelet ran his seminar for specially invited students in his magnificently furnished eighteenth century courtyard overlooking a courtyard complete with statues. After initial difficulties with the truly baroque and anarchic administration of Vincennes, I thought of transferring to the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. Chatelet advised me that this would be unwise. Hostility there to Foucault and other such progressive 'media' intellectuals reigned supreme. Indeed, I had already been able to confirm this assessment at an
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earlier meeting with Professor of Philosophy, Yvon Belaval, at that institution in 1978.9
An interview Chatelet warned me that Michel Foucault had a reputation for being very hard with women and treating them with scant civility. He also noted that Foucault had written himself into a corner with his theories on power (an assessment I agreed with) and that his writings on sexuality clearly had an important personal dimension. Thus forewarned, I wrote to Foucault in November1981explainingthatlwaswritingathesisonhisworkandwould like to meet him. He replied by return post with an unevenly typed and neatly signed letter fixing a time and a place. With some trepidation and armed with a series of questions, I fronted up to his modern apartment block in the rue de Vaugirard in the 15th arrondissement. Foucault opened the door and welcomed me into a white, light filled apartment. 10 He took my coat and politely asked whether I would like a whisky or an orange juice. In the best traditions of French politeness, he also complimented me on what I was wearing. As he was fetching an orange juice, I noticed a copy ofJacques Le Goff's La Naissance du purgatoire11 lying neatly on a coffee table. Throughout the two hour interview, there was not a trace of the hostility towards women that Chatelet and others had warned me about. The only annoyance he showed was when I asked him about why he chose to reinterpret his past work in interviews and on the roles of Nietzsche and Marx in his work. He was clearly irritated by constant questions on these matters and, particularly in the case of Nietzsche, elicited a marked lack of interest in pursuing the topic. A number of interesting things emerged about Foucault during this interview, the first of these was his politeness and generosity. I was particularly impressed that he took my questions seriously, as a young female student from what, to French people, is a remote and insignificant, if admittedly somewhat exotic part of the world. Also impressive was his sheer intellectual brilliance: his ability to provide instantaneously clear and convincing answers, sometimes in point form complete with conclusion. A genuine and unaffected modesty about his work was also apparent. Downplaying my remarks on the originality and revolutionary character of his ideas, he said that much of what he had said had actually been discussed before by the British historians of the 1930s, the Annales historians as well as by historians and philosophers of science. He did recognise, however, that his work was certainly able to challenge and disturb people and to make them think. At the outset of the interview, he was eager to stress that he was not a philosopher by training and that he was merely interested in tinkering with a few ideas. It was much to his regret, he said politely and diplomatically, that he had no general philosophical 'theory'. When I assured him that although I was enrolled in philosophy at Vincennes, my background was actually in the hybrid discipline of history and philosophy of science, he seemed relieved and elicited a lively curiosity about this unusual educational formation. I then proposed a question on notions of the 'specific'
Introduction
5
versus the 'universal' intellectual. At this point, I will temporarily abandon my excursion into 'ego-history', in favour of another genre- the interview -, setting forth my questions to Foucault and his replies, which I have reconstructed from notes made at the time in 1981. 'It seems to me', I said, 'that you are a particularly striking example of a "universal intellectual". You are interested in everything, you speak for those who have no voice and you are a" great writer" whose work exercises a wide influence. You also fight to improve conditions for people in the name of certain values such as justice which nonetheless you are careful not to specify' .12 To this, Foucault provided a typically logical and orderly reply. 'The universal intellectual', he said 'has three functions. First of all, he [sic] pronounces a discourse on human destiny. Secondly, he speaks for man in general. Thirdly, he indicates where the general good is, what it consists of and what has to be done'. Foucault then claimed that he occupied none of these positions for the following reasons: 'First of all', he said, 'I do not know what the ideal society would be like. To say what it should be would be despotic. The law of proscription is an oppressive law. Secondly, I have never spoken in the name of anybody. Even in the case of my activity in relation to prisons I have not published any texts. Only the prisoners published texts. Thirdly, speaking the truth poses much more of a problem than laying down the law which does not upset anything or anyone. I did not speak for madmen and prisoners. My aim is to speak the truth in order to unsettle things. The fourth point is that I can say such and such a thing in order to produce action. The question is then, if it is true what are you going to do about it? How are people listening going to react?' Foucault went on to say how disappointed he was that the then recently elected socialist government in France, had not approached him to make any contribution at all in relation to the problem of prisons in France. This kind of disappointment was perhaps typical of the reaction of French intellectuals in general to the rise to power of the socialists in France in the early 1980s. The intellectuals had set great store on a left wing electoral victory, but found that once the socialists were in power, the usual constraints of political expediency became paramount and that they were, in addition, deprived of the glorious status of being in opposition and the unjustly persecuted victims of power with a legitimate political party to lend that status credibility. The general populace were far more cynical. After the socialist victory, la France profonde blamed every social ill, no matter how trivial, on the socialist victory. One lady travelling in the metro, noting a young person with their feet up on the seat, remarked that such undiscipline was clearly the result of the new socialist government. Such observations were standard, as were the kinds of disappointment expressed by Foucault and other intellectuals. On the subject of power in general I put the following questions to Foucault: 'In your discussion of power, I have noticed a certain circularity which might pose problems for political practice or activity: that is power is bad, resistance is good. However in your system, resistance is only the inverse of power and if it wins it therefore becomes bad. You try to escape
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from this circularity by proposing a kind of morality. Do you have another more critical solution to this problem or do you think a moral stance is sufficient?Inaddition,ifpoweriseverywhere,doesthismeanthatitissome kind of metaphysical category?' Foucault replied by insisting that it was 'relations of power' that were everywhere not power itself, which meant that power could not possibly qualify as a metaphysical category in his work. And these relations of power existed of necessity because people had different notions of what was meant by liberty, existence and choice or will. 'Power is not bad in itself', he remarked. 'There is no primary state of affairs without power, but there can in fact be good and bad power. One universal principle is that power can be described as bad ifit is no longer tolerated'. He went on to say that it is often a matter of degree and how much people will put up with. For example, nobody particularly likes the exercise of fiscal power, namely taxes. But fiscal power in itself is not an evil because people manage even if they are not happy about it, as it generally has a worthwhile purpose (even if it could certainly benefit from reform). On the other hand, if the state goes too far and puts a tax on salt, people cease to tolerate this kind of power. 'The secret of power is not violence', Foucault continued, 'Violence only appears when it no longer functions'. Power is something that is never completely accepted, he added, but it cannot be rejected in a global fashion (namely by revolution). Resistance to power is never strong enough and this is where the intellectual comes in: the analyst of power must remember that acceptable power is power that is accepted. Power creates an illusion which hides its mechanisms of repression and it was precisely in those areas where the illusion was strongest that Foucault saw it as his task to mount a struggle. I then asked Foucault about his habit of reinterpreting his past work in terms of his current ideas, suggesting that he was engaging in 'declarations of tyranny' in this regard. 13 He laughed at this and said that if other people were free to interpret his work as they wished he saw no reason why he should not reinterpret his own work just as freely. Thus, the real focus of his work had always been 'subjectivity' not power. If he had indeed referred to power extensively in his work it was because he was interested in one specific aspect that he felt had been neglected- namely relations of power. Still on the subject of the recasting of his past work, I asked him why he had decided to replace the original preface to Folie et Deraison with a new one in 1972. He explained that the style of the original preface worried him at a time when structuralism was at its height in France. In the original preface, and indeed in the entire book, he had used the word 'structure' extensively and quite innocently. The use of this term had prompted critics to seize the opportunity to dub his work'structuralist'. Neither had he liked the original references to 'experience' in 1972. In 1982, however, he declared himself willing to entirely reinstate the first preface as he was currently returning to these earlier perspectives. I also ventured to ask Foucault about the role of marxism in his work: 'Your work seems to be becoming closer to marxism, for example in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, val 1., there are a whole range of terms such as "the political economy of the will to truth", "the
Introduction
7
production of truth", "economies of power" and frequent references to the concept of class. Why this adoption of an almost marxist analysis after your relegation of marxism to a mere"storm in a children's paddling pool" in The Order of Things?' With a sigh of irritation, Foucault replied: 'My relation to Marx and marxists is a simple and relaxed one. I am not a marxist because I use the terms, neither am I anti-marxist. The systematic use of certain words might appear marxist, but they indicate rather a kind of anti-use of marxism. I say what I feel like in relation to marxism. Thus, in The Order of Things, one can dispense with marxism, it is not useful at all for the analysis. However, nineteenth century society requires that one discuss marxism - it is useless to search for other terms. If I use certain terms such as class, it is because it is less pretentious to do so. The bourgeoisie as a class indicates a certain moral normativity, a certain ethics of behaviour, of being something different from other classes. There is no reason why I should deprive myself of the use of this term'. On the subject of that other philosopher, with whom Foucault's name has so often been linked, he demonstrated a manifest lack of interest and a disinclination to discuss the subject at length. What had interested him about Nietszche, he said, was that, contrary to Hegel, he was interested in the 'irrational of history' and that he 'put historical questions to philosophy from the basis of a historical body ofknowledge .... Nietzsche demanded that history ask questions of philosophy'. I then asked Foucault a series of questions on structuralism and his book The Order of Things. After asking about the confusion and controversy surrounding the notion of the episteme, he declared that he really did not know what all the fuss had been about, as in the history of science it was quite common to posit discontinuities. Indeed, he stressed that, in general, concepts of discontinuity and normativity such as were embodied in the concept of the episteme were common in the history of science. When he had shown the manuscript to the noted historian and philosopher of science, Georges Canguilhem, the latter had not, for this reason, felt it necessary to comment on the issue. After two hours of discussion, I thanked Foucault and received the enthusiastic assurance that I was welcome to come back and ask him more questions at a future date. I was not to know, however, that time was running out and I did not avail myself of the opportunity so kindly offered. I heard of Foucault's death back in Australia, when a colleague, the literary critic Sam Goldberg, casually mentioned over lunch that he had seen a reportto that effect in that morning's Canberra Times, the only newspaper in Australia to carry the news. It is possible that a secret fan of his work lurked on the staff of that paper, which had invited me to publish a review of Discipline and Punish in 1980.14
A conference Four years after Foucault's death in 1988,Ihad the good fortune to be invited to a historic conference in Paris, organised by the newly formed Foucault Centre headed by Fran~ois Ewald. This event united a star studded and argumentative collection of intellectuals, militants and academics from
8
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around the globe and ended with a concert by Pierre Boulez and the ensemble intercontemporain. 15 The gathering was remarkable, not only for the fact that it was a virtual who's who of the French intellectual set and of well known Foucault commentators from other countries, but also for the fact that almost everyone present had known Foucault personally in some capacity. This gave the whole event which took place in a theatre on the Champs Elysees, the atmosphere of a lively and theatrical wake. And in the fine tradition of the wake, it provided an excellent opportunity for the living to exchange various anecdotes over lunch. At a table to which I had been invited by the historian Paul Veyne, those present outdid each other with reports on what Foucault had said to them just before he died and who had known the soonest that he was seriously ill. Each story, including my own, was listened to with careful attention and sage nodding of heads ensued. It was some years after this remarkable gathering and when the Foucault industry had become a well established, if dispersed, fact, that, inspired by a suggestion of my mother's, I formulated the idea of running a conference myself- a conference which would not be so much on Foucault himself, but which would showcase and bring together the enormous diversity of research triggered off by his ideas. The conference would also mark the tenth anniversary of his death. One of the famous slogans of 1968, with whose eventsFoucault'snamehassooftenbeenlinked,was'souslespaves,laplage'16 and what better place to hold an event on a philosopher who had so resolutely sought to dig up every paving stone in sight, than the beach resort of Surfer's Paradise? Thus it was that in July 1994, that an impressive collection of some 300 delegates including over 100 speakers came together from Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, Finland, the United States and Canada to present their findings. These findings covered an enormous and often surprising range of subjects and disciplines: from the most esoteric subjects in philosophy, literature and history, to professional disciplines such as nursing, education, accounting, management, public relations, law and architecture. Matters which had scarcely, if ever, been addressed by Foucault such as feminism, the third world, Australian history and environmentalism were discussed at length. In 1980, an anonymous interview with a 'masked philosopher' had appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde. Weary of celebrity and straining to be heard from under the heavy weight of his previous work, Michel Foucault wanted to address readers who would listen to his words rather than his reputation. In this interview, with the lyricism that so often characterised his style, he dreamed of a new type of critique: I cannot help thinking of a critique that would not try to judge, but, rather, would try to allow a work, a book, a sentence, an idea to exist. It would start fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind and seize spray in flight so as to scatter it further. Such a critique would create not a profusion of judgements, but signs of existence, it would call them, raise them from their sleep. And if it sometimes invented these signs? So much the better! Criticism by condemnation sends me to sleep. I would like to see a critique that sparks the imagination. It would not reign supreme, or be robed in red: it would bear the lightning of possible stormsP
Introduction
9
The present collection of work first presented at the 1994 conference Foucault: The Legacy demonstrates just how far Foucault's own work has served to actively encourage the realisation of this dream. 1
What follows is an experiment in what Pierre Nora has termed 'ego-history'. He notes: 'A whole scientific tradition has led historians over the last century to efface themselves behind their work, to hide their personality behind their expertise, to barricade themselves behind their index cards ... The findings of historiography over the last twenty years have emphasised the pretence of this impersonality and the precarious character of its guarantee'. With this in mind, he invited a number of historians to write their own 'history', to apply their historical methods to their own lives. 'Neither falsely literary autobiography, neither needlessly intimate confessions, nor abstract profession of faith, nor crude attempt at psychoanalysis, the exercise consists in clarifying one's own history as one would clarify another's'. Pierre Nora (ed), Essais d'ego-histoire, Paris: Gallimard, 1987, pp.57 If further guarantees of academic respectability are needed, one might also invoke the notions of Pierre Bourdieu on the 'selfreflexivity' of the sociologist and his own excellent foray into this genre "'Fieldwork in philosophy"', Chases dites, Paris: Minuit, 1987.
2
Michel Foucault, 'La situation de Cuvier dans l'histoire de la biologie', Revue des sciences et de leurs applications, 1970,23, pp.62-9.
3
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock, NewYork: Pantheon, 1972.
4
Paul Patton and Meaghan Morris (eds), Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, Sydney: Ferat 1979.
5
Jean-Claude Guedon, 'Michel Foucault: The Knowledge of Power and the Power of Knowledge', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 51, 1977, pp.245-77.
6
The best examples of this irrepressible irony in Foucault's written work are to be found in his small book on Magritte This is not a pipe, trans. James Harkness, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, and an article titled 'Monstrosities in Criticism', trans. Robert J. Matthews, Diacritics, voll, no. 2, Fait 1971, p. 57-60.
7
A version of the work for this thesis was published as a book titled Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? London: Macmillan, 1989, 1993.
8
For a short appreciation of his life and contributions see Gilles Deleuze, Pericles et Verdi,: La philosophie de Fran~ois Chatelet, Paris: Minuit, 1988.
9
Incidentally, Yvon Belaval had been a candidate at the same time as Foucault in 1970 for the tenure of the Chair of Philosophy (renamed the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought when Foucault was appointed) at the College de France.
10 As he explained to Charles Ruas, what he liked about the apartment was 'the clarity of light for thought' 'Postscript: An Interview with Michel Foucault', Death and the Labyrinth: The World ofRaymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas with an introduction by John Ashbery, New York: Doubleday, 1986; London: Athlone Press, 1987, p.171. 11 Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire, Paris: Gallimard, 1981. 12 This question refers to the views Foucault expressed in 'Intellectuals and Power', discussion with Gilles Deleuze, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Preface and Introduction by Donald Bouchard, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,
10
!foucau[t:
13 I was alluding to a statement in the highly ironic preface to the 1972 edition of Foucault's Histoire de la folie al'age classique, Paris: Gallimard, 1972, p.10. He says: 'Thus is written the Preface, first act which begins to establish the monarchy of the author, declaration of tyranny: my intention should be your precept, you will bend your reading, your analyses, your criticisms to what I wanted to say .... I am the monarch of the things I have said, and I maintain an eminent sovereignty over them: that of my intention and of the meaning I wanted to give to them.' 14 Clare O'Farrell, 'Prison and Social Control', The Canberra Times, 29 March 1980, p.15. 15 The papers from this conference were published as Michel Foucault philosophe: rencontre internationale Paris, 9, 10, 11 Janvier 1988, Paris: Seuil, 1989. 16 'under the paving stones the beach'. 17 Foucault, 'Le philosophe masque', (entretien avec C. Delacampagne), Le Monde, 6 April1980: Le Monde-Dimanche, pp.l.
Part One Literature and History
Sade as a Figure Of Radical Modernity: Making-and-Breaking the History of Sexuality PeterCryfe We are now seeing the rapid development of a discipline whose founding assumption or locus communis is that sexuality has a history, and that 'it' is not the same thing in all times and places. Foucault's contribution to this development is evident. It does not of course consist in making general affirmations about the impossibility of generalising, for that would indeed be the kind of cheery 'relativism' imputed to him by self-appointed defenders of universalist humanism. Rather, Foucault has contributed impressively to a history marked by shifts, mutations and reconfigurations, by events that allow us to speak of a 'before' and an 'after'. Historians of sexuality, in following his lead, are becoming adept at showing that things in the sexual domain were not ever thus: many of us see our task, in part, as the critique of anachronism and the undermining of claims to naturalness. This relatively new habit of thinking, with all its methodological small change, cannot just be said to derive from Foucault: that would be a remarkably un-Foucaldian way of reading his work. There are all kinds of precedents and supports in this area: the work of Aries and his colleagues, and some aspects of phenomenological enquiry are striking examples. But I want to concentrate here on something else which, I shall argue, served as aninitialsupportfor,andaneventualhindranceto,Foucault'sdevelopment of a history of sexuality. Thereisadiscourse,a thoroughly narrative one, that functions here as both adjuvant and adversary: the historical narrative that has so regularly been constructed around the work of Sade. For such influential figures of French modernism as Breton, Bataille, Desnos, Eluard, and Klossowski, Sade is the exemplary figure- not to say the author- of literary modernity. The divinity of the divine Marquess comes precisely from this: his courage in voicing the hitherto unspoken truth of human sexuality. The story told in modernist accounts of Sade is not of course the history of sexuality that is now being constructed by scholarly activity, but rather that of an author who breaks heroically with the past. The Marquis de Sade is, we are told, 'unprecedented', sans precedent. 1 Before him, no writer dared to tell the hidden truth of desire. Indeed, the power and the prestige ofSade's narrative fiction seems to be rehearsed or mimicked in this account of his vigorous coming to prominence. His emergence from the shadows of incarceration and his heroic coming to light are themselves both symptom and symbol of a new eroticism. The story of Sade, thus told, has some of the marks of a standardly modern erotic narrative, with emphasis placed on virility as performance. Sade, the man, stands like a phallus, says Bataille, following Swinburne. 2 This tumescent glory we must recognise, according to doctrine, as both an affirmation and an acting out of desire.
Satfe as a !figure Of!l?Ju[icaf !Modernity
13
The power of Sade's eroticism is declared by writers such as Bataille to stem from the telling of a previously unspoken truth. The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom is 'a book which dominates all books, in a sense, because it tells the truth that is in the depths of man, wild and unchained, the truth that he is required to hold in and keep silent'. 3 The revelation of that which was previously hidden within all humanity can only be a profoundly subversive act, and that is why French literary modernism, especially the Surrealist movement, takes Sade as exemplary. According to Eluard, he is, with Latureamont, one of the two most daring, revolutionary writers of all time. 4 For those who tell this story, Sade is indeed a splendidly literal 'incarnation' of the thrust of insurgent truth: 5 As Bataille says We should not be at all surprised that a truth so strange and so difficult should first of all have come to light in such a dazzling form ... How could a burst of poetic brilliance have failed to accompany this nascent truth? There had to be a revolution, and the clamour of the Bastille gates giving way ... to deliver ... the secret of Sade.6
It is noteworthy that the word used here in French to evoke Sade's glory is eclat. Its double meaning brings together the notions of visual brilliance and expressive power, thus enriching the phallic imagery surrounding his name. This is the 'cannonical' Sade, with three n's, and not two. Literary modernism, committed as it is to the idea of revolution and the thematics of radical discontinuity, tends to construct Sade as the author of revolution. Breton sees his thought as the most subversive of all/ and Apollinaire describes him as 'the freest mind [or spirit] that has yet existed'. 8 No revolution is more telling, or more tellable than the French Revolution, 'that unsurpassed moment of fracture? and no writer more revolutionary than Sade. That his thought might have contributed decisively to the development of revolutionary principle or practice is not at issue. It is rather a matter, as Blanchot says nicely, of a semiotically compelling' coincidence': 'I think that the word coincidence is the most appropriate one. With Sade ... we have the first example of the manner in which writing and the freedom to write may coincide with the movement of real freedom as historical crisis and interruption'.lO Building on this coincidence, exploiting it and making it good have been part of the ongoing work of the Surrealist movement, including its dissidents and its descendants. The process of canonising Sade as a hero of the revolution entails not just glorifying his work - or rather, his figure - but demeaning and forgetting any minor competitors or predecessors. Desnos says, for example, of the seventeenth-century writer Brantome, that he may have been of some interest as a writer on eroticism in earlier times, but that he has now been 'relegated' to the attic by Sade's brilliance. 11 This is how Sade's name, and the story that it stands for, have become the fortified place of erotic modernism. As Roger Borderie says, with what has become routine hyperbole, 'the name of Sade constitutes in a way the strongest geometrical place for criticism in our literary culture' .12 It has become widely acceptedat least within this narrow, fortified place of literary judgment- that Sade's is the most outrageous work of all time. Never, says Blanchot, in any literature or at any time, was there a work so scandalous. 13 Demonstrably,
14
!foucau[t:
such glorification of Sade depends on a slippage between historical and transhistorical discourses, whereby Sade's actions and his work become the Revolution for all time, standing tall as a kind of archetypal historical moment, and producing masterpieces that belong to the universal canon of splendidly unprecedented works of genius. This is the discourse about Sade, then, which can be seen as both helping and hindering, enabling and pre-empting, the development of Foucault's account of the historical nature of sexuality. The explicit purpose of Histoire de la folie al'age classique is not that, of course, but it is interesting to note that the history of la deraison is said to reach a decisive moment with the appearanceofSadeandGoya.Sadeistalkedabout,atthispointinFoucault's work, in an almost self-consciously second-hand way. Foucault refers to Sade's texts as they are quoted in Blanchot, and prefixes a reference to the Society of the Friends of Crime (represented in Sade's Histoire de Juliette) with the adjective fameuse, which means 'much talked about'. 14 The Sade of Histoire de la folie is indeed a much-talked-about Sade, and Foucault's text finds him quite predictably, alongside Goya, as one of the two exemplary figures of that moment in history: Sadism is not a name given belatedly to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive culturalrealitywhichappearedpreciselyattheendoftheeighteenthcentury, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of western imagination: unreason turned into raving of the heart, madness of desire... . The emergence of sadism takes place at the point in time where unreason, which had been shut away and reduced to silence for more than a century, reappears, no longer as a figure of the world, nor as an image, but as the discourse of desire (HF:381).
This location of Sade could be called a successful graft of the Surrealist divine Marquess onto the history of madness, retrieving Sade's revolutionary desire as the voice of unreason. But this may also help to explain why Foucault's history, at this point, becomes both abrupt and lyrical, as if the unreason of classical times, subjected to such painstaking analysis, were now being spoken and released in one moment, as a hitherto pent-up force. It is almost as if Sade, and desire, had no previous history, no discursive formation, other than that produced by their very incarceration. In Les Mots et les chases, Foucault seems to find Sade standing astride the epistemic fault line, as a paradoxical monument to rupture.lS The Story of Juliette, we read, 'is a narrative which closes the classical age on itself, just as Don Quixote had once opened it up'.16 But at the same time as he closes off the classical, Sade is said to express 'the dark repeated violence of desire which breaks in waves over the limits of representation' (MC:223). Sade is both inside and outside the classical age: he is both the sea and the rocks, swept up and sprayed over by the dark waves of desire. And it is here, at this point in his archaeology of knowledge, that Foucault begins to sketch a history of what we have come to call sexuality. Before the late eighteenth century- that is, before Sade- there was the age of libertinage, and after, the age of sexualite (MC:222). The date of this change seems heavily overdetermined, allowing Foucault's historical thesis to 'coincide' with the mythical Sade narrative.
Satfe as a !figure Of!l?Ju[icaf !Modernity
15
By the time of Histoire de la sexualite, however, the story, and the history, have been fundamentally reshaped. A remark made almost in passing early in the first volume draws attention to 'a few historical facts that can have value as markers'. 17 This may well be a discreetly reflexive comment on the narrative meaning-making of historians. Whether it serves to relativise Sade is not made explicit at that stage, but it is noteworthy that Foucault now locates historical breaks in quite other places than in the work of the divine Marquess. When he tells the repression-liberation narrative, albeit in reluctant and ironic mode, he locates the two supposed moments of radical change in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries (VS:12-21; 152-158). But even as he moves to reject this account, he insists on the fact of there being more than one period of mutation. The first of the 'fertile moments' he identifies as the mid sixteenth century, and the second as the early nineteenth. The old epistemic break may still be there, but Sade's work, even a propos of sexuality, no longer appears to be one of its privileged sites. The onset of modernity, in the practice of constructing sexuality as truth-to-beavowed, is located much earlier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the development of an art of confession. Thus, when Foucault affirms polemically that 'telling the truth of sex ... does not date from the nineteenth century' (VS:76), he is presumably rejecting two narratives at once: not only the psychoanalytical history he explicitly refers to, according to which Freud is the unprecedented genius of sexual perception (VS:210), but also the familiar account given by Bataille, Breton, and their colleagues, whereby Sade is the genius who prefigured Freud's truth, and announced it from the depths of his prison. The 'discursive explosion' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries no longer has Sade as its unique detonator, nor even as one of it most brilliant flashes: Foucault turns his attention towards the nineteenth century proper, and begins by quoting a text that dates from 1846 (VS:155). Gone, too, are the romantic metaphors used earlier to evoke the process of change. Surgir, meaning to well or rise up, had been used in Les Mots et les choses to recount the emergence of desire-from-within as the very force of modernity (MC:222), but now Foucault has recourse to quite other verbs, like relancer and reporter (to restart, carry over, or continue) when he does in fact talk of Sade. These verbs begin with the prefix re-, and thus deny absolute newness in this context. Of Sade, we are told that 'he carries on [relance] the injunction in terms that seem directly retranscribed from the treatises on confession' (VS:30), and that he 'carries over [reporte] the exhaustive analysis of sex into the exacerbated mechanisms of the former power of sovereignty' (VS: 195-6). In parallel fashion, the verb relancer is used about Freud. This does not amount, perhaps, to a demolition of the monumentally historical Sade, who is still referred to, on just one occasion, as contemporaneous with the threshold of our modernity (VS:195). Yet whatever the significance of the threshold metaphor, describing a space through which discourses are relances or reportes, it seems clear that modernity no longer has need for- nor perhaps even room for - explosive revolutionary genius.
!foucau[t:
16
One of Foucault's achievements inHistoire de la sexualite is to relativise the ardent truth of modernist narrative histories. He does this, in part, by pointing to the existence of traditions of eroticism- what he calls forms of ars erotica- in which a body of knowledge is transmitted through initiation. This form of knowledge he opposes at the outset to a modern, Western scientia sexualis (VS:77-78), although he comes to ask later whether scientia sexualis might not intersect with, or maintain, elements of ars erotica (VS:94-96). In paying such attention to transmitted or traditional knowledge, he is giving renewed importance to the discursively already-known in the construction of sexuality. To follow through with this later work of Foucault, we really need to put Sade in his place, alongside other, equivalent places, to read Sade's work in relation to its non-canonical antecedents and contemporaries. Attentive descriptions of the classically, authoritatively, didactically erotic are likely to serve us better than repeated spasms of modernist excitation. 1
See, for a literal example, Marcel Moreau, 'Le Devoir de monstruosite', Obliques, 12-13, 1977, 15.
2
Georges Bataille, La Litterature et le mal (Paris: Gallimard/Idees, 1957) 119.
3
Ibid
4
Paul Eluard, 'L'Evidence poetique', Obliques, 12-13, 1977, p.141.
5
Cf Philippe Roger, Sade: la philosophie dans le pressoir (Paris: Grasset, 1976) p.47.
6
Bataille, La Litterature et le mal, p.147.
7
Andre Breton, Anthologie de l'humour noir (Paris: Sagittaire, 1950) p.31.
8
Paul Eluard, 'Evidence poetique', ibid, p.34.
9 Jacques Henrie, 'L'Intolerable et l'infame', Obliques, 12-13, p.40. 10 Maurice Blanchot, L'Inconvenance majeure (Paris: Pauvert, 1965) pp.24-25. 11 Robert Desnos, De l'erotisme considere dans ses manifestations ecrites et du point de vue de l'esprit moderne (Paris: Cercle des arts, undated) p.37. 12 Roger Borderie, 'La Question de Sade', Obliques, 12-13, p.2. 13 Maurice Blanchot, Lautreamont et Sade (Paris: Minuit, 1949) p.217. 14 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie al'fige classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972) p.552. Subsequent references given in brackets in the text (HF). 15 Man Ray's imaginary portrait of Sade is discussed in terms akin to these in Roger, Sade: la philosophie dans le pressoir, pp.15-6. 16 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les chases (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) p.223. Subsequent references given in brackets in the text (MC). 17 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite, I. La Volante de savoir (Paris: Gallimard 1976) p.22. Subsequent references given in brackets in the text (VS).
Foucault/Artaud: The Madness of the Oeuvre
UwartlSclieer 'You are raving Monsieur Artaud. Youaremad. I'm not raving. I'm not mad'. (Antonin Artaud 1947). 'to define true madness, What is't but to be nothing else but mad?' Hamlet Act II, Sc.II 'Schizophrenia is not only a human fact, but also a possibility for thought' (Gilles Deleuze 1969).
Foucault's 'folie'
a l'age classique he characterises la folie for the first time as 'rien d'autre sans doute que l'absence d'oeuvre'. 1 La folie: madness, but also a word covering a range of meanings from slight eccentricity to clinical insanity.2 It is here situated in a relation to 'oeuvre'; work, product, work of art, body of work. Histoire de la folie is, at least in part, the history of this relation and its formulation in this phrase which, in its different modalities, moves through Foucault's various histoires de la folie clearing a space in which la folie can be conceptualised without confining it. Henri Gouhier, the head of the jury which in May 1961 heard Foucault's defence of his doctoral thesis Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie al'age classique, said that he did not understand what Foucault meant by defining la folie as l'absence d'oeuvre. Foucault's detailed replies can be read in his essays 'LeNon du pere' of 1962 and 'La Folie, l'absence d'oeuvre' of 1964. Yet in the revised preface to the 1972 edition of Histoire de la folie, Foucault attempts to play down the significance of his phrase as a formulation given un peu al'aveugle, somewhat unwittingly or blindly. Shoshana Felman has noted that in the French translation of Hegel's Encyclopaedia, the entry under 'la folie' says that 'blindness is the distinctive characteristic of madness'. 3 PerhapsinthislaterprefacetohisbookwearereadingFoucault's ironic acknowledgment that defining madness is itself a slightly mad gesture, though not quite an acknowledgment that, as Derrida characterises it, his entire project in Histoire de la folie is mad. 4 In Derrida's notorious encounter with this text the phrase is une note de base (a fundamental motif) in Foucault's book. This is perhaps because he recognises its centrality to the problematical project of a history of madness and also perhaps because a certain interpretation of it neatly fits his arguments since if the absence of the oeuvre signifies 'the lack of any conventionally determined structure', syntactical, narratological, aesthetic etc. 'it implies that madness is both de jure and de facto' excluded from Descartes' text, and from Foucault's writing about madness, both of which are inevitably bound up with 'Reason in general'. 5 It is a phrase which thereby threatens In Foucault's original preface to Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie
18
!foucau[t:
Foucault's entire project simply because it is a formulation of madness, a gesture of confinement. Yet the foreclosure of the project would depend on an epistemologically closed position, an absolute determination, of which this phrase constitutes only a possible and, as I will argue, inverse embodiment. It is not a happy positivist gesture but a negative lyrical framing which, however, with respect to at least one of its subjects, ironically serves to exclude a project which it had been the work of the book Histoire de la folie to re-insert into history. This 'fundamental motif' of the book reappears at its end as the structuring principle of a certain radical discursive practice, linking the themes of Histoire de la folie with the work of one of its central figures, the French poet, dramaturge, actor, artist and essayist, Antonin Artaud.
The madness of the proper name Artaud appears in Histoire de la folie as one in a litany of proper names including Nietzsche, Nerval, Holderlin, Roussell and de SadewhichFoucault uses metonymically to refer to certain texts in literature which embody the 'lyrical explosion' of the pathos of la folie. Derrida notes 'that Artaud is the first to attempt to reassemble, on a martyrological tree, the vast family of madmen of genius. He does so in Van Gogh, le suicide de la societe (1947)'. 6 Artaud does this earlier in a lesser known text called Lettre Sur Lautreamont in 1946. Derrida does not note this since his interest in this context is the Nietzsche/Artaud nexus and Artaud does not mention Nietzsche in his earlier text. Derrida is also concerned with the temptation afforded by the similarities between these figures to construct a 'single genealogy' for 'mad poets'. Derrida resists. Foucault and Artaud, by implication, fail to resist. James Miller, whose biography of Foucault is one of the first texts to explore in any detail the significance of Artaud to Foucault, describes the function of this list of names, in a characteristically overenthusiastic passage, as having been 'invoked in a kind of gnostic mantra, as if to summon the shattering raptures of the "thought from outside"'. 7 While this does have some pertinence with respect to the potential intrusion of the 'thought from outside' or 'mad thought' into the signifying systems of these writers, the invocation of this litany is more precisely an emplacement of la folie within a transgressive discursive practice of which these proper names are the indices, a positioning of madness within the field of a borderline literature which does not silence its voices but modulates them through the matrices of the text. Shoshana Felman locates the logic of this process of emplacement in 'Foucault's conception' that 'the proper meaning of the notion "madness" is precisely that it has no proper meaning, that it is, and rigorously, "a false concept", a metaphor indeed- of the radical metaphoricity which corrodes concepts in their essence, a metaphor of literature, from whose obliteration philosophy proceeds'. s This then places madness as metaphor in relation to the oeuvre as that which dissolves its conceptual base, a process of indefinite transformation within a finite work. This is not however an attempt to constitute the 'conceptual center (sic)' of madness since this kind of positivist project is doomed from the start as it'encounters only the decentralizing energy of its displacement'.9
j'oucau{t/Ylrtaua
19
Felman's curious translation of the phrase gives the formulation 'madness is the absence of production' which, in the context, emphasises the disintegration of authorial control over production. (Yet this occurs in a production of which the disintegration of the author is also the constitutive exercise). Meaning is therefore unachieved and, for Felman, the oeuvre is then always 'unaccomplished' and the absence of the oeuvre is precisely this 'unaccomplishment at work'. However, madness can here become a metaphor for literary production or non-production since a writing which actively produces 'loss of the relation to the mastery of meaning, of achievement' doesnotabolishitself as writing but only that mythology ofits centre, one of whose avatars has been the figure of the author. Felman's rather loose translation of 'oeuvre' here enables some curious positions in her own text. In the context of the question about madness, 'oeuvre' is given as 'production' to enable non-production to emerge but in a discussion of Descartes (through Derrida) it is this same 'oeuvre', this time given as 'work', that guarantees its non-madness, 'Of course the discourse of Descartes insures itself through its own language, through the production of a "work", against this kind of madness from which it springs; as does the discourse of Foucault' .10 Perhaps it is simply the invocation of these proper names that guarantees the status of their works. Artaud's name is invoked differently to profoundly question the status of the work itself. Not simply another example in Foucault's litany of mad artists and of the non-histories to which have they been assigned, it is with respect to Artaud that Foucault dedicates the phrase which defines for him the only way to perceive la folie in this sense of being faithful to its excess. It is, for Foucault, a way of maintaining himself at the limit of his discourse since Artaud was there before him refusing any attempt at recuperation. Foucault's book is written in the wake of this refusal, in its fragile acknowledgment of the profound irrecuperability of the experience of madness.
The presence of the oeuvre Artaud wrote in L'Ombilic des Limbes in 1925, one of his earliest works, 'I don't conceive the oeuvre as detached from life ... Each one of my works dribbles over me'. This evocation of the conception of a work as dribbling offspring is typical of the physical imagery which Artaud employs to give the sense of a 'Discourse ... now reunited with its birth in a perfect and permanent self presence' .11 In Le Pese-Nerfs of the same year, he writes 'toute l'ecriture est de la cochonnerie', 'all writing is pigshit', and later in the same piece,'And I told you: no oeuvre, no language, no speech, no mind, nothing. Nothing except a fine Pese-nerfs (nerve scales)' (OC:tl). These are constant themes in Artaud's oeuvre which situate it in terms of the limit. The silence from where it came and the impossible presence for which it sets out are both perilously located within the work as on a kind of fragile scales which threaten the work's existence. Here Artaud thematises the absence of the work as a category to be overcome. Any oeuvre, as Foucault points out in his L'Archeologie du savoir, can only be invoked as a unified discursive whole through an interpretative operation which 'deciphers in the text, the transcription of something that it both conceals and manifests' .12 Artaud's oeuvre, which Foucault gives here as an
20
!foucau[t:
example oftheproblematicnature of the oeuvre, consists ofletters, glossolalia, theatre, art, film criticism and reviews, essays, texts on theatre, manifestos, poems, screenplays, a novel, translations, fragments, spells, sketches, portraits, recordings, acting roles in cinema and on the stage. His collected works at Gallimard now includes some 28 volumes. Though variegated and complex,hisoeuvreistestimonythathismadnessdidnotreduce,orelevate, him to a permanent silence. Historically, Artaud's work was absent for only six years. The last texts Artaud produced before his eight year, eight month incarceration in the asylums of France were published in June of 1937. From this time up to September 1943 Artaud's production was spasmodic and he did not give his name to anything produced in this period. Apart from this absence of production, Artaud always took pains to ensure that his work would survive and would be seen or read, though he also maintained that any work was necessarily partial and incomplete. This desire to create durable works that would be read is perhaps most clearly and famously evident in his correspondence with Jacques Riviere.
The work as absence In early 1923, when Artaud was 27, he sent some poems to La Nouvelle Revue Fran~:aise, a chic literary journal. The editor rejected them but said would like
to meet the author. Artaud duly met Riviere, the editor, and began a correspondence with him in which he sought to explain the essential insufficiency of his poetry. His reasons have to do with what he calls a 'frightful disease of the mind' in which his thought 'abandons' him, not in the manner of a loss of inspiration but 'd'une absence totale' (0Ct1:20). This has Artaud in 'constant pursuit' of his 'intellectual being' and this is why, as he says, 'whenever I can seize upon a form, however imperfect it may be, I hold it fast, in the fear of losing all thought'. Here the substance of what Artaud is describing at the level of an experience is close to some of Foucault's various descriptions throughout Histoire de la folie, of the limit of the work and madness; for example, in the first text appended to Histoire de la folie, 'La Folie, 1'absence d'oeuvre, 'la folie indicates the void from where the work comes' (HF: 581). But Artaud's work brackets the absence of the oeuvre, anticipating its demise and remembering the silence which surrounded its appearance. La folie is also precipitated by Artaud, not in order to master it, but to continue writing, to continue producing. He writes to Riviere that the formal defects of his works do not have anything to do with a lack of intellectual development but with a 'central collapse of the soul' (0Ct1:25) and that he has 'suffered greatly in the mind' and therefore has 'a right to speak' (0Ct1:28). In one of the poems included in the letters is the phrase 'L'oubli /Deracine la symphonie' (0Ct1:29) which refers to this absencing by which that 'something furtive' steals from Artaud the words he has found. Yet Artaud's reworkings of this crime in the poems are not enough to give them any real power. Next to his letters they appear as pallid apologia for a defunct form. His letters describe with a greater intensity this process of uprooting conventional forms in an oblivion which locates itself at the core of Artaud's new work, his reworking of the very concept of 'work'. Here Artaud
j'oucau{t/Ylrtaua
21
problematises 'work' since conventionally determined 'work' is theft of the proper 'work' of thought. Thinking itself becomes 'work'. But not any thinking: it is, as Deleuze observes, a matter of bringing into being that which does not yet exist. Thinking the unthought, the central collapse of thought. 13 Artaud can be seen here abreacting, though not yet refusing, conventional aesthetic forms; these 'scraps' that he has salvaged from his own experience of la folie. He uses the poems, written in quatrains, as a test of the power of the form over his content, yet in the letters he openly repudiates literature. What becomes evident as a result of this correspondence is that Artaud wants to save as work the absence of the work as Riviere sees it, as the literary establishment defines it, and perhaps as 'institutionalised rationalism' determines it, in order to make heard his 'absence of a voice to scream with'. Here we see the process by which Artaud's work will emerge as the repudiation of this kind of oeuvre.
Absenting the oeuvre Artaud sent the poems to Riviere as a kind of abreaction of a form that would subsequently become as dead for him as it was alive for Riviere, testing the elaboration of its demise in the letters. Riviere who had maintained all along that the poems themselves lacked 'unity of impression' (0Ct1:22) suddenly proposed to publish the letters and one or two poems as examples. Here at the very beginning of Artaud's career as a writer, the process becomes visible by which his oeuvre is constituted, in the sense that Foucault describes of an externally applied set of criteria which determine a particular interpretative operation, in this movement of overlooking a certain nonachievement or un-accomplishment of aesthetic categories such as 'unity of impression', in order to reconstruct an experience of suffering, a tragic experience. Riviere responds to Artaud in the manner of a benign and paternal psychologist treating the symptoms he reads in Artaud's lyrical letters. For Maurice Blanchot, in his enormously influential Le Livre avenir, this publication of 'the Artaud/Riviere correspondence is an 'event of great significance' since it calls into question the essence of artistic production as origin and accomplishment, 'whether the movement which gave rise to the work is that in view of which the work is sometimes achieved, sometimes sacrificed'.14 Whether this movement, the 'experience of the oeuvre' as Blanchot calls it, becomes the work which it has been unable to achieve, since Riviere is interested in it- and for Riviere, 'it' is a question of psychopathology- rather than the failed poems. For Blanchot, the collection of Artaud's letters, or the oeuvre as testimony to the experience of the oeuvre, is still 'naturally not an oeuvre'.15He is,like Riviere, more interested in 'that void' which Artaud's non-oeuvre 'exalts, denounces, traverses, preserves, fills and is filled by'. We read in these phrases the trace of that spectral (absent/ present) discourse which haunts Foucault's book with its formulation of la folie, l'absence d'oeuvre. Artaud's name is scattered throughout Histoire de la folie but figures most prominently in the preface, the concluding chapter and the introductions to
22
!foucau[t:
the three parts, constituting a kind of frame through which the text appears to gaze, as if through a window whose opacity has been acknowledged but subsequently largely ignored, for nowhere in this book is there a sustained discussion of an Artaud text. Two pages from the end, the phrase designates Artaud's madness as 'precisely the absence of the oeuvre' (HF:555). A naive reading of this would suggest that this is precisely why there is no systematic engagement with Artaud's work as it is here effectively eclipsed by 'that experience, the constantly renewed courage of that ordeal, all those words hurled against a fundamental absence of language, all that space of physical suffering and of terror which surrounds or rather coincides with the void', after all, 'that is the oeuvre itself' (HF:556). But to what extent is this an essential naivete determined by Foucault's emplacement of Artaud throughout the book? And here leaving aside the question of the naivete of'speaking in the direction of Artaud' at all,16 Jane Goodall, in her recent book on Artaud, challenges Foucault's project in the direction of this emplacement. In relation to Histoire de la folie she writes, 'Artaud's function is to represent madness as that which is denied presence' .17 For Goodall, as for Artaud, madness was not silence, but noise, which, in given historical circumstances, was forcibly silenced. Foucault and Derrida both frequently remind us that madness is silence because it places itself outside signification, outside the symbolic order. This also means that a certain language will be deaf to the noise of madness, a deafness which is itself interpretative of the non-meaning of mad works. This paper is, in part, a response to Goodall's challenge with its suggestion that Foucault not only appropriates Artaud, but misappropriates him as well, since, like other post-structuralist encounters with Artaud, Foucault's bears witness to what Goodall describes as 'the insistence with which Artaud and his works are conjured away as an enabling condition for some of the most influential discourses in which he features'.1 8 In a section of the first chapter dealing with the confrontation, at the beginning of the Renaissance, between the critical consciousness of la folie and a cosmic or tragic consciousness which was to be buried in the Classical age, this question raises itself with a certain insistence. It is this tragic consciousness which, for Foucault, came to express itself in the oeuvre of Artaud, in that oeuvre which would pose to twentieth century thought, if it was paying attention, the most urgent of questions .. .in that oeuvre which never stopped proclaiming that our culture has lost its tragic centre, from the day that it excluded outside of itself the great solar madness of the world, the tearings where the 'Life and Death of Satan Fire' ceaselessly fulfils itself (HF:40).
This latter is a reference to a text by Artaud which was commissioned by Gallimard in February 1935 and was to be called Satan. The work was never completed but several pages of fragments remain and were published in June 1953 by Editions Arcanes with a preface by Serge Berna who found the manuscripts by accident in 1949 when helping a friend empty an attic. These fragments were composed between 1935 and 1937 when Artaud left for Ireland. This first edition includes other fragments from the same period which did not relate to the work in progress of Satan but were nonetheless
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23
included. It is perhaps not entirely insignificant that Foucault appears to cite this dubious edition of Artaud's fragments in the context of a discussion about the eclipsing of the tragic experience of madness by critical consciousness. Foucault asks, 'How did this movement end which leads Artaud to say (qui faisait dire aArtaud), "The Renaissance of the 16th century broke away from a reality which had these possibly superhuman laws, and the humanism of the Renaissance was not an enhancement but a diminution of man?"' (HF:40-41). This is the only place in the entire book where Foucault quotes Artaud directly, (or appears to). The footnote draws the reader's attention to a 1949 edition of Vie et Mort de Satan le Feu, an edition which never existed. This reminds us of how casual Foucault could be with citations but also suggests something about his project in this book and how the absence of the oeuvre as a historical determination is something which Foucault's misciting is destined here to repeat, with respect to Artaud. It would, however, not be possible, and Foucault acknowledges this, to announce the systematic silencing of the noise of madness and the exclusion of its shapeless structures without locating a madness, without re-confining it in order to permit it, once again, to be spoken for. This is a structural necessity which, as Derrida points out in his own commentaries on this relation, no commentary can hope to avoid. But there is this other isomorphism to resolve here in which Foucault's mis-citation of the Artaud text, as the, no doubt, benign refusal of its proper site, its mis-siting or misplacement, is that which renders the mad text absent, unreadable and not the impossibility of deciphering its structures. These words which Foucault attributes to Artaud at this judicious site in his own argument are not to be found in Vie et Mort de Satan le Feu. Where therefore in Artaud's enormous oeuvre did Foucault find them, did Artaud ever write them? I cannot answer these questions here. Suffice to say that if Foucault's book still produces this kind of uncertainty in relation to this oeuvre - and it is not here a case of an uncertainty prior to Foucault's inscription of it- then questioning Foucault's deployment of the Artaud text may restore to both the aberrations proper to them, rather than those achieved 'un peu al'aveugle'. For despite his project Foucault here demonstrates that in practice it is always other texts that are mad and forfeit their site, and their right to accurate citation. They surrender their place even if, as in Artaud, they can mould themselves to the space left vacant by the oeuvre. In these early pages of Histoire de la folie, Artaud's work is called upon to witness its own absenting and the abreacting of its own relation to la folie.
Works of Madness In the closing section of the book Artaud is called upon once more to witness
to the pure enigma of la folie as the absence ofthe oeuvre. Foucault differentiates the relation between Artaud's madness and his work (along with Nietzsche and Van Gogh) from the Classical experience in which a language of delirium could not have been a work. The limit that united them in their separation, where 'madness challenged the work' (HF:555), did not collapse them into each other but raised a question about them, 'Is it madness, or a work?' The question of the truth of the oeuvre was then, still possible. For the modern world this relation is now a contestation more 'perilous' than
24
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before. Madness is still the absolute rupture with the work. It forms the constitutive moment of the work's abolition and draws there the 'exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void' (HF:556). But it no longer gives access to the truth of the oeuvre. Madness now signifies the 'decision beyond which this truth ceases irrevocably' (HF:556).19 This is the context in which Foucault reintroduces Artaud's madness. It does not 'slip through the cracks of the oeuvre, it is precisely the absence of the oeuvre, the reiterated presence of that absence, its central void experienced and measured in all its endless dimensions' (HF:555). This sketches in a broad sense the trajectory of Artaud's work, 'The identification of the work with the body, and the self-created body with the workasthefinalachievementofpresence'.20Notquitetheunityofbeingand language (since Being for Artaud was another excuse for not living) but a rupture in the limit imposed by the finitude of the work. Artaud's oeuvre brackets this 'experience, not yet divided, of division itself'. Foucault describes this oeuvre as an escarpment or cliff against the void of the absence of the oeuvre. 'L'oeuvre d'Artaud eprouve dans la folie sa propre absence' is translated as' Artaud's oeuvre experiences its own absence in madness',21 but I would like to insist on a variant translation of eprouver which can also mean 'to test'. This would give the sense of Artaud's continual testing of the limit of language and of the oeuvre and the way he manipulates madness in order to challenge these structures. Thus, if his work is in some sense 'mad' it is not in the sense of a 'loss of relation to mastery of meaning' but, on the contrary, in the sense of its radical interrogation of the conventions that enable meaning, those conventions that Artaud had to use in his work, but which he did not confine himself to. What is perhaps 'mad' in Artaud is this fundamental critique within his work of its own socius, or relation to the social sphere. His essay Van Gogh, le suicide de la societe, ironically the only one of his works to ever win a major literary prize, is a sustained attack on this concept of the socius, the sick society of the normal which desires only its own company, and so invents psychiatry: And what is a genuine madman? He is one who prefers to go mad, in the social sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain higher idea of human honour. That's how society strangled all those it wanted to get rid of, or wanted to protect itself from, and put them in asylums, because they refused to be accomplices to a kind of lofty swill. For a madman is someone that society does not wish to hear but wants to prevent from uttering certain unbearable truths. But in that case, internment is not the only weapon, and the concerted assemblage of men has other ways of undermining the wills of those it wants to break.22
This passage reminds us of Foucault's remarks on the normal and the pathological in Histoire de la folie. The hom me normal is the creation of a system which identifies the socius of the subject of law and thereby situates the madman at 'the meeting place of the social decree of internment and a juridical knowledge which discerns the capacity of the subjects of law'. For Foucault all psychiatry is only possible after the establishment of this synthesis which forms the 'concrete a priori for all our psychopathology with its scientific pretensions' (HF:147). In 1946 Artaud wrote:
j'oucau{t/Ylrtaua
25
Instead of treating madmen ... you should treat yourself and cauterise, I say cauterise the so called healthy ones, they are the true invalids, the dreaded carriers of the plague. After 9 years of internment I never saw an insane person in an asylum, but outside I saw the nauseous and revolting army of allthoseunrecognisedbythepolice,bymedicineorbythechurch'(OCt23:417).
Where Artaud writes 'you', Foucault writes 'we', suggesting that they are both conscious of approaching the work from a different place, a different experience of la folie, the one tragic/ critical and the other more self-consciously critical, to adapt Foucault's own schema. Yet for both Foucault and Artaud, the oeuvre, through madness, can' open a void ... a question without answer' by which the socius, in this modern Western world, is obliged to question itself. Though the oeuvre 'endlessly drives madness to its limits', it is nonetheless'contemporary with madness' and by its excess can become, in the cases of Artaud and Foucault, an oeuvre of madness. This phrase oeuvres de folie appears in the final sentence of Histoire de la folie in a discussion about the work of Artaud, Nietzsche and Van Gogh. These are still limit cases for Foucault, 'contours against the void', for 'where there is an oeuvre there is no madness' (HF:556). Artaud wrote elsewhere, in regard to the Theatre of Cruelty, that his oeuvre is not' a symbol of an absent void' but the 'affirmation of a terrible and moreover implacable necessity' andthisisthatthelimitwhichdividestheworkfromeverythingthatitisnot, must be transgressed continually to recognise the infinite potentials of life, of the body and of la folie. The oeuvre must respond to its own 'elastic potential', as Artaud says, to become 'something made out of nothing rather than out of something' (0Ct24:493). Oeuvre not in the sense of a document of some pathological state nor the 'structural analogy' to such a document producing 'effects of madness',23 but a place where one limit trespasses into another, where the truth of the oeuvre is no longer possible as the parameters of its indeterminacy cannot be determined. As Derrida points out, 'Madness ... is the work or the absence of the work'. 24 In his response to Foucault's book, he indicates the kind of work that Foucault, despite himself, was making a place for, the kind of work that I'm gesturing towards here, since 'although the silence of madness is the absence of the work, this silence is not simply the epigraph of the work, nor is it, as concerns language and meaning, outside the work. Like nonmeaning, silence is the work's limit and profound resource'. 25 Foucault's book is, after all, an archaeology of this silence. A noisy silence which speaks of madness. Madness at the heart of the work which calls itself Artaud, no longer absent but experiencing itself and testing its limit against the pure potential of another work. One that is always to come, and which is, rigorously, the absence of the work. 1
2 3
Plon, Paris, 1961 p. v. All references to the original preface are made with respect to this edition. All other references are to the Gallimard edition of 1972, hereafter cited as HF in the text. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated. Shoshana Felman, 'Madness and Philosphyor Literature's Reason'. In 'Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy'. Yale French Studies 52:224, 225 fn15. Ibid, p.206.
!foucau[t:
26 4
Jacques Derrida, 'Cogito et histoire de la folie' in L'Ecriture et la Difference, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967, p.87. Hereafter cited as 'Cogito'.
5
Geoff Bennington (1979). 'Cogito Incognito', Oxford Literary Review 4:6, 7. This is Bennington's formulation of the basis of the dispute between Foucault and Derrida.
6
Jacques Derrida, 'La Parole Soufflee.' In L'Ecriture et la Difference p.274 fn 1. Hereafter cited as 'Parole'.
7
James Miller (1993). The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York: Simon and Schuster p.213.
8
Felman, 'Madness and Philosophy' p.227.
9
Ibid.
10 Ibid, p.217. 11 J. Derrida, 'Parole', p.289. 12 M. Foucault, L'Archeologie du savoir, Paris: Gallimard, 1969. The Archeology of Knowledge, trans., Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, New York: Pantheon, 1972. I am quoting from this translation, p.24. 13 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, 1994, p.147. Translation of Difference et Repetition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. 14 Maurice Blanchot, Le livre avenir, Paris: Gallimard, 1959, p.51. 15 Ibid, p.54. 16 J. Derrida, 'Parole', p.253. Derrida says that 'to diminish it (this naivete) we would have to wait a long time ...a dialogue would have to be opened between... critical discourse and clinical discourse'. He is referring to the manner in which Artaud maintains his vigilance over his own madness and work in a way which abreacts any commentary or any reduction of his experience by anticipating the gestures of the clinic or the critic and thereby disallowing them their privileged 'metaphysical' status. Such discourses can only take place within an essential naivete or position of simplicity with respect to Artaud, since they only read one 'entire side' of Artaud's duplicitous discourse. 17 Jane Goodall (1994). Artaud and the Gnostic Drama, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p.217. Dr. Goodall is one of the most thorough and vigilant readers of Artaud's work, as this book shows. 18 Ibid, p.218 19 The French text here is a little misleading since the verb fonder, 'to found', is used instead of fondre, 'to melt or dissolve' which the context seems to suggest. 20 J. Goodall, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama, p.217. 21 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, Random House NY, 1965 trans. Richard Howard p.287. This is a translation based on the abridged second edition of HF of 1964, Plon 10/18 series. 22 Antonin Artaud, 'Van Gogh le Suicide de la Societe' in OC XIII p.17. 'Van Gogh the man Suicided by Society', trans. Mary Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Artaud Anthology. Ed Jack Hirschman. San Fransisco: City Lights Books, 1965. p.137. 23 Clare O'Farrell (1989). Foucault: Historian or Philosopher, London: Macmillan, p.78. 24 J. Derrida, 'Parole', p.290. 25 J. Derrida, 'Cogito', p.84 .
Eleutheromania: Freedom and Surveillance in Beckett and Foucault
The French experience of the 1940s is not synonymous with theW orld War Two which we, educated as members of the victorious Anglo-American alliance, believe we already know. It includes not only the period of Nazi Occupation and the establishment of a French government at Vichy solicitous to the Nazis, but what French historians have come to callla guerre franco-franraise, a virtual civil war fought along ideological lines which began in earnest on June 16, 1940 (when Marshal Petain requested an armistice with the invading Germans), reached its peak in 1944, and continued after the Liberation of France in the form of a purge or epuration, of those alleged to have collaborated with the Nazis (Rousso 1991:5). In The Vichy Syndrome the French Historian Henry Rousso describes Marcel Ophul's film The Sorrow and the Pity, released in 1969, as perhaps the first symptom of what was to be a new outbreak in France of cultural aftershocks from the French experience of the 1940s (Rousso 1991:100). The film ends with an American newsreel dating from 1944 in which the singer Maurice Chevalier flippantly denies rumours he has been killed in the purge and refutes in a more serious tone allegations that he had made a tour of Nazi Germany during the German occupation of France. He then goes on to sing, unaccompanied, a song with the following chorus: Let the whole world sigh or cry I'll be high in the sky
Up on top of a rainbow, Sweeping the clouds away (Ophuls 1975:173).
This case highlights problems to do with judgement and the apportioning of blame and guilt which are symptomatic of many of the cases shown in the film. It also highlights problems that arise when one State overturns another which had been its enemy. Many of those caught up in the epuration claimed that under Vichy they too, after all, were only obeying the law (Lottman 1986:133-134, 269; Lacouture 1991:75-6) and is that not what they had always been taught to do and would again be expected to do under the new State? Rousso suggests in The Vichy Syndrome that, 'The Sorrow and the Pity... disclosed a structural tension: the transmission of a history so full of conflict depends on an alchemy whose secret no one possesses ... The truth is partial in both senses' (Rousso 1991:114). If we allow ourselves the luxury of stepping back for a moment, and reading all these texts- The Sorrow and the Pity, The Vichy Syndrome, Discipline and Punish-in the same way as we read Beckett's Molloy, that is, as literature rather than as history, then Rousso's use of the words 'partial truth' might cause bells to ring as we connect it with Foucault's description of the penal
28
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arithmetic which began in the Middle Ages, and carried through till the eighteenth Century. Here the proofs used to establish the guilt of an accused were divided into categories such as full proof, semi-full proof, and distant clues. A full proof established guilt beyond doubt and led to execution, a semi-proof, however, meant that the accused was semi-guilty, and thus could undergo punishment (Foucault 1991:36, 42). Denunciation by a single eye-witness was enough to establish a semi-truth. We might further equate this with the functioning of justice in France both under occupation and during the purge. In both cases denunciation was enough to justify arrest. 1 As well as this in The Sorrow and the Pity we catch glimpses of a brutal world of punishment of the body strikingly similar to that world evoked by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. We are told of members of the French militia who confessed to plucking out the eyes of captured members of the resistance, placing live maybugs in their sockets and sowing up the eyelids (Ophuls 1975:166-7). A former member of the Resistance describes the torture of his wife at the hands of 'they': her nipples were torn off, she was burned with a red hot iron, and he concludes: 'they buried her without killing her first. .. one of the torturers himself told me that he had pushed a broom handle into her vagina' (Ophuls 1975:158). The horror of such events do not pale beside Foucault's description of the execution of Damiens the regicide (Foucault 1991:3-6). In addition, in The Sorrow and the Pity we encounter something very like the judicial torture, of the eighteenth century and before, which Foucault also describes at length. Here the accused, already considered semi-guilty because of some semiproof, is tortured in an effort to extract a confession (Ophuls 1975:38-42). In The Sorrow and the Pity, Madam Solange tells us how she was arrested as a suspected collaborator- because of a letter of denunciation (p.161)- and tortured: ' ...he plunged me into the tub. I held on...but they punched me on the chin.. .! had to swallow water ... the man... put his finger in my mouth. I threw up ... and he asked: 'Well, do you confess or don't you?' ... At that moment I regretted not having done anything' (Ophuls 1975:162-3). There were also events recounted in The Sorrow and the Pity which remind us of the use of punishment as a form of public edification, both under the occupation where the Nazis rounded up and executed scores of people in retribution for any casualties sustained at the hands of the Resistance, and under the purge where, for example, women who had formed relationships with Germans had their heads shaven before being subjected to public ridicule. For our purposes then, it is significant that both Foucault and Beckett lived through this period of French history. Foucault was at school, sheltered from direct exposure to the worst incidents. Didier Eribon quotes Foucault: .. the war arrived. Much more than the activities of family life, it was these events concerning the world which are the substance of our memory ... Our private life was really threatened. Maybe that is the reason why I am fascinated by history and the relationship between personal experience and those events of which we are a part. I think that is the nucleus of my theoretical desires (Eribon 1991:10).
'Efeutfieromania
29
Beckett, unlike Foucault was not sheltered from the worst. On June 9, 1940 he joined l'exode, the great exodus from Paris of people fleeing the Nazi invasion, which often came under fire from the Luftwaffe. He stayed' on the trot' for a month until finding shelter with friends. In October he returned to Paris and joined the Resistance. He saw a number of Jewish friends picked off by the Gestapo. 'Gloria', the Resistance cell for which he worked operated successfully until it was betrayed by a defrocked priest in 1942. Of the eighty to one hundred and twenty members allied to this group fewer than twenty survived the war. Once the cell was betrayed Beckett and his future wife Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil were forced into hiding. Beckett hidatdifferenttimesatthehomesofMarcelDuchampandNatalieSarraute's mother (under the floorboards). On one occasion Beckett was forced to hide up a tree with a colleague from the Resistance while the Gestapo patrolled below. When they eventually found haven in a hotel, his friend, driven to distraction by the ordeal leapt from a window to his death. Beckett and Suzanne escaped to the unoccupied zone with forged papers. Having made their way to Avignon by train it took them a month to walk one hundred and fifty miles to the village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse, hiding by day and walking at night. There Beckett again worked for the Resistance, this time somewhat sporadically. He hid weapons for the local cell and disappeared, sometimes from several days at a time, on missions. 2 Speaking about Raymond Roussel in an interview given in 1983 Foucault suggests that the discovery of Beckett3 was an important part of his intellectual development: I belong to that generation of people, who ... were enclosed in a horizon...mapped out by Marxism, Phenomenology, Existentialism, etc. All of which were extremely interesting and stimulating, but which led in the end to a feeling of suffocation.. .! was like all the other students of philosophy at that time, and for me, the rupture came with Beckett: Waiting for Godot, a breath-taking spectacle (Ruas 1985:105).
The proximity of these analogies to the notion of 'discursive formation' which Foucault outlines in detail in The Archaeology ofKnowledgeis apparent. Foucault continues: we live in a world which is completely interwoven, completely interlaced with discourse ... of enunciations that have actually been pronounced, of things which have been said ...To this extent, you cannot dissociate the historical world in which we live from all the discursive elements which have inhabited this world and inhabit it still (Ruas 1985:102).
Following Foucault then, one could try to evoke the matrix of interlaced discourse common to those who lived through the forties in France, specifically as it relates to the notions of surveillance and freedom apparent in Molloy by Beckett and Discipline and Punish by Foucault. The most celebrated image of Discipline and Punish is Bentham's Panopticon, a structure consisting of a central observation tower surrounded by a circle or semi-circle of cells allowing the warder to view the' abnormal individual' at all times and ensuring that the inmate, constantly aware of being watched, cannot see the authority who is watching creating a power-structure which includes
30
!foucau[t:
'insuperable asymmetries' and excludes 'reciprocities'. 4 The major effect of the Panopticon is, 'to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the autonomous functioning of power' (Foucault 1991:201). La guerre franco-franraise threw the workings of the disciplinary power structures Foucault describes into sharp relief. This supposition is based on the understanding that in this time of civil war almost everyone not in power at a given moment could be seen, potentially, as an 'abnormal individual'. The society had become one of fear and suspicion. Anyone else might be of the enemy camp. In 1950-51 the American academic Laurence Wylie conducted a study of day to day life in the small village of Peyrane. This village, in the French Province of Vaucluse, is only a few miles from Roussillon, where Beckett spent the second half of World War Two. Wylie describes the villagers' experience of the war as follows: people had to buy on the black market...and that meant selling something on theblackmarket...Thismeantadoubleviolationofthelaw...toliveinconstant violation is uncomfortable. It leaves one vulnerable to attacks by les autres, that is, by all the other people ofthe village. By a simple denunciation any one of les autres may threaten disaster to your family (1974:28).
All this was taking place in a small village where people had lived all their lives, and no Germans or Americans so much as even passed through this village during the war. Surely this is an example of the 'autonomous functioning of power'. It also gives an extreme example of the workings of our own society as Foucault sees it, a society not of spectacle but of surveillance (Foucault 1991:209, 217), so that nowadays, '"Discipline" may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power' (Foucault 1991:215). The workings of such power through surveillance permeates Beckett's Molloy. Yet the power-structure is often subverted by humour. Early in the novel a policeman suspects Molloy of vagrancy and demands to see his papers: 'Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers. Now the only papers I carry with me are bits of newspaper, to wipe myself, you understand, when I have a stool.. ..In a panic I took this paper from my pocket and thrust it under his nose' (Beckett 1976:21). Papers were a problem for Beckett who found himself without them when the Germans invaded, got by on forged documents later on, then found it difficult to re-enter France after a brief trip to Ireland because the French authorities were refusing to issue new papers to resident aliens (Bair 1990:324, 337, 358). Later a woman named Lousse takes Molloy in for reasons that at first seem like love - she wishes him to take the place of the dog which had taken the place of a child- but quickly the relationship becomes one of imprisonment linked to the voyeuristic pleasure of surveillance (Becket 1976:31-56). Molloy describes their relationship: 'Lousse herself I saw but little, she seldom showed herself to me, out of tact perhaps, fearing to alarm me. But I think she spied on me a great deal, hiding behind the bushes, or the curtains, or skulking in the shadows of a first-floor room, with a spy-glass perhaps' (Beckett 1976:50). While Molloy meets few others on his journey towards his
'Efeutfieromania
31
mother he is still aware of surveillance and a need to be on guard against 'they'. The following description brings to mind the two separate months during the war when Beckett was on the road, attempting to avoid the authorities, sleeping in haystacks by day and walking at night to avoid capture, careful perhaps of those seduced by Vichy's National Revolution with its slogan, Travail, Famille, Patrie [Work, Family, Fatherland], who believed in 'cleaning up' France, in a moral sense. 5 Molloy describes the techniques of survival: Morning is the time to hide. They wake up, hale and hearty, their tongues hanging out for order, beauty and justice, baying for their due ...towards noon things quiet down ...Corning up to four or five of course there is the nightshift, the watchmen ... you hug the walls, bowed down like a good boy, oozing with obsequiousness ... the night purge is in the hands of technicians ...the bulk of the population have no part in it... Day is the time for lynching, for sleep is sacred (Beckett 1976:62-3).
However, the description of the society of surveillance is most apparent in part two of Molloy, that section narrated by the bourgeois spy Moran. Unlike Molloy, Moran, at least at the commencement ofhisnarrative, is very much part of society. And it is a society in which everyone is watching everyone else, the society of les autres described by Laurence Wylie. Moran is an agent of some sort working for a certain 'Youdi' who is something like Godot as his invisibility is linked with a perhaps exaggerated power. Youdi is almost God-like in his omniscience. To begin, the world Moran describes is middle class and calm (Beckett 1976:85). The calm is soon shattered by the arrival of Gaber, Youdi's messenger, who instructs Moran to pursue Molloy. Subtly then, elements of hierarchical power are brought to our attention. In the two pages preceding Gaber's arrival, Moran, to carefully choose a cliche, is master of all he surveys, he is the one who issues instructions, to his son, to his cook, he watches over his bees, he imagines that he sees without being seen, but somehow Gaber sees him: 'I thought I was hidden from anybody coming into my grounds ... and in fact I must have been. But at the noise of the gate being slammed I turned angrily and saw ... this high mass bearing down on me'. Moran's illusion of power begins to evaporate and we are made aware that the world he inhabits is one of continual surveillance. He catches a glimpse of his son spying on him from behind a bush and notes without satisfaction that, 'Peeping and prying were part of my profession. My son imitated me instinctively' (Becket 1976:86). After his interview with Gaber he cannot locate his son, who he deduces has gone to church without him. But Moran is ever suspicious. He reasons as follows: Is he barefaced enough to tell me ...that he had been to mass if he has not .. ? And I determined to get the truth out of Father Ambrose ...And if Father Ambrose could not enlighten me, I would apply to the verger ... For I knew for a fact that the verger had a list of the faithful and that, from his place beside the font, he ticked us off when it came to the absolution. It is only fair to say that Father Ambrose knew nothing ofthese manoeuvres, yes, anything in the nature of surveillance was hateful to the good Father Ambrose (Beckett 1976:88).
!foucau[t:
32
We soon learn, however, that Father Ambrose is not above surveillance as he questions Moran's son as to why Moran was absent from mass (1976:92). But the world of surveillance spreads beyond the confines of the church. Moran describes a meeting with an atheistic neighbour: 'A neighbour passed. A free-thinker. Well, well, he said, no worship today? He knew my habits, my Sunday habits I mean. Everyone knew them and the chief perhaps better than any, in spite of his remoteness (1976:90). The purpose of surveillance is the desire to impose discipline. This is evident not just in the Sunday ritual, but in the moment to moment happenings in the household which Moran rules with the severity of the old-testament God. 'I like punctuality', he states, 'all those whom my roof sheltered had to like it too' (1976:90). Moran has a methodical mind and it is the progressive loss of this method and the gradual moving away from his disciplined approach that he seems to equate with the progressive dissolution of his body and mind. This is the substance of his narrative, as, in his quest for Molloy, he comes to resemble his quarry more and more. As a final example for this list of the workings of surveillance in Moran's narrative we could turn to an episode with Moran and his cook, Martha. Martha also watches Moran, as Moran watches her, as he watches his son who watches him, as Youdi watches Moran. In this hierarchy Moran has some, though not absolute, power over those he observes. His power is mitigated by the extent to which they are able to watch him in turn and trick him with regard to their behaviour. The only absolute power is that ofYoudi, who has this power because, like the operator of the Panopticon, he sees without being seen, and seems to see all. In contrast, to exercise his own power Moran must remain vigilant and use his powers of deduction where his powers of surveillance let him down. But he fails to catch-out his cook, whom he suspects of an act of defiance. The scene is as follows: The stew was a great disappointment. Where are the onions? I cried. Gone to nothing, replied Martha. I rushed into the kitchen, to look for the onions I suspected her of having removed from the pot, because she knew how much I liked them. I even rummaged in the bin. She watched me mockingly (1976:94).
The humour is augmented when we remember that the standard French rebuff hurled at someone considered a busy-body, the equivalent in fact to 'mind your own business', is 'occupe-toi de tes oignons', which translates literally as 'mind your own onions'. Tied to the notions of surveillance and power in Beckett is the notion of freedom. This is explicitly stated by Moran early in his narrative. He is well aware of the power-structure including 'insuperable asymmetries' and excluding 'reciprocities' which operates between himself and Youdi. He does not want the Molloy case, foisted on him by Youdi via Gaber, but can do nothing about it even as he pretends he is free to choose. He states: 'it's hard for me to refuse, I said, knowing perfectly well that in any case it was impossible for me to refuse. Refuse! But we agents often amused ourselves with grumbling among ourselves and giving ourselves the airs of free men' (1976:87).
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In October 1942, using false papers and having secured the services of a
passeur, who was meantto act as an escort, Beckett and Suzanne DeschevauxDumesnil prepared to flee Paris and make their way into la zone libre of Vichy France (Bair 1990:337). At this time the schoolboy Michel Foucault lived in Poitiers, twenty kilometres from la zone libre. As Didier Eribon puts it, 'On the other side of the line was almost another world, and one needed a pass to get there' (1991:7). 6 As wehavealreadyseen with the self-surveillance of the villagers of Peyrane, the notion of freedom operating in la zone libre or the 'free zone' of Vichy was very much one of degree. Molloy says, 'Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into' (Beckett 1976:35). There is no complete freedom possible as there is no outside the law of surveillance. In Discipline and Punish Foucault suggests that: 'the carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside ...In this panoptic society ... the delinquent is not outside the law; he is, from the very outset, in the law (1991:301). While it is not possible to be truly free it is perhaps possible to gesture in that direction. Molloy gives an example: '!...loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit' (Beckett 1976:48). When Molloy was being translated into German the translator wrote to Beckett requesting that he explain this particular passage. Beckett replied: This passage is suggested (a) by a passage in the Ethics of Geulincx where he compares human freedom to that of a man, on board a boat carrying him irresistibly westward, free to move eastward within the limits of the boat itself, as far as the stem; and (b) by Ulysses' relation in Dante (Inf. 26) of his second voyage (a medieval tradition) to and beyond the Pillars of Hercules, his shipwreck and death .. .I imagine a member of the crew who does not share the adventurous spirit of Ulysses and is at least at liberty to crawl homewards ... along the brief deck (Beckett 1954:28).
In the early days of the war at least, the French Resistance amounted to not much more than this kind of gesture of defiance. In The Sorrow and the Pity two former members of the Resistance talk about their experience of the war. Marcel Faouche-Degliame states that, 'the problems of everyday life no longer existed: we were very free ... '. Emmanuel D'Astier says, 'I think you could only have joined the Resistance if you were maladjusted'. FaoucheDegliame concludes: 'free in the sense that, being outside organised society, all of society's objectives did not affect us very much, it simply didn't matter any more' (Ophuls 1975:118). What is interesting about these comments is the notion of the type of freedom they convey, which appears in the work of both Beckett and Foucault: indiscipline, disorder. Tied to this idea of freedom is acceptance of the possibility or even inevitability of failure. Failure, as much a positive as a negative value, emblematic of the indomitable spirit fighting against impossible odds. Like Don Quixote or members of the Resistance such as Emmanuel D' Astier who states: 'we had the kind of Quixotic feelings that failures can always have' (Ophuls 1975:118). 'Failure' has long been seen as one of the key ideas in Beckett's work. To
34
!foucau[t:
quote some famous lines from Beckett's late work, Worstward Ho: 'All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better' (Beckett 1989:101). The phrase 'indomitable spirit' gives a wrong impression. It is possible that the failure, linked with its freedom comes about as much against the will of the one who fails as because of that will. The failure might be said to issue from the subject's resistance to subjectification. Foucault suggests that power should not be thought of as primarily destructive, but primarily creative. It produces the individual (Foucault 1991:194). It produces the soul (1991:29). Yet if the subject comes into being through subjection, how can such a subject be free or freed, when, as Foucault concludes, 'The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself' (1991:30)? An answer might be that a type of freedom is to be found in that being which resists (even if unintentionally) subjectification. Such a being, in perhaps its quintessential form, is Beckett's unnamable. Foucault states that the, 'turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure ofheroization; it functions [now] as a procedure of objectification and subjection' (Foucault 1991:192). Molloy, like Moran, is writing a report about himself at the behest of others. While the purpose of neither report is fully explained, it could be argued that they are meant as certificates of identification through which these abnormal individuals might be subjectified (Foucault 1991:199). It might be further argued that the process fails, firstly because the narrators claim that they often lie and tend to invent themselves as they go along, and secondly because Moran comes to resemble Molloy through the course of his narrative thereby subverting the process of individualisation. The title of Beckett's first play, written in French just after Molloy and never published or performed, is Eleutheria, a Greek word meaning 'Freedom'. The protagonist Victor Krap, who wants nothing other than to not take part in society at all, is constantly harried by others who are scandalised by his behaviour (he comes, after all, from a good family), and demand that he explain his failure to act, his failure to take part. He cannot or will not. It is something he can only approach by negative definition. He says: 'I have always wanted to be free. I don't know why. I don't know what that means either, to be free ... But far from words I know what it is'. 7 It is this distance from others, the world, and the self, that Victor equates with freedom. He continues: (With incoherence): It's acceptable to you that one goes beyond life, or that it goes beyond you, that one becomes irreducible, on condition of paying the price for that, of putting aside one's freedom. He has given up, he is dead, he is mad, he has found faith, developed a sarcoma, nothing to take exception to. But to no longer be among you by means of being free, that is shameful and scandalous (Beckett 1947:115).8
That is to say, it is acceptable to live your life 'outside' the norms established by society so long as you submit to being categorised and institutionalised: in a hospital, a lunatic asylum, a monastery, or a cemetery, for example. But to abandon society altogether and live 'far from it', with
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space understood here as intimately tied to perception (or rather want of it, as perception is tied to surveillance), as a means of achieving freedom is scandalous. The most visible of those who attempt to live in such a way, those who achieve such distance from our society while still living among us used to be called vagabonds. Molloy lives as a vagabond and as such attracts the attention not only of the police but of Welfare groups, who Foucault also mentions as serving a function of surveillance and discipline within society (1991:212). Foucault cites numerous examples oflaws enacted specifically as a means of incarcerating vagabonds who were seen as living dangerously outside society and therefore outside the law (1991:88, 122, 210, 289-290). The most telling example of the equation of vagabondage with freedom is the case of Beasse, a child of thirteen, charged with vagabondage and sentenced to two years in prison in 1840. Foucault quotes from an account of the trial: The judge: ...What is your station in life? ... [Beasse]: I don't work for anybody. I've worked for myself for a long time now... -lt would be better for you to be put into a good house, as an apprentice and learn a trade,- Oh, a good house, an apprenticeship, it's too much trouble. And anyway the bourgeois... always grumbling, no freedom.- Does not your father wish to reclaim you?- Haven't got no father.- And your mother?- No mother neither, no parents, no friends, free and independent (1991:290-1).
Certainly attaining freedom through vagrancy is not seen as an attractive possibility by all of Beckett's characters. Moran hears a voice telling him that completing his report will help him, 'endure the long anguish of vagrancy and freedom'. And he exclaims: 'Does this mean I shall .. .lose and be banished from the absurd comforts of my home where all is snug and neat and all those things at hand without which I could not bear being a man... which it was my life's work to build' (Beckett 1976:122). The allusion to 'work' in relation to propriety and property might be connected again with the Vichy motto, Travail, Famille, Patrie, and perhaps with the signs which hung at the gates of entrance to Auschwitz and other Jewish extermination camps, stating, 'Arbeit macht frei', or 'work makes one free'. Foucault discusses how work was considered a purifying ethic reforming the morally corrupt whose sins were seen to stem from idleness (1991:121-2). Such illdiscipline, such idleness might also be linked to the subculture called 'zazou' that existed in Paris during the Occupation. Les zazous were a collection of upper middle class French teenagers who listened to American swing. At a time when the French were being told their defeat in the war stemmed from decadence, a loss of the great values, (such as work, family, etc.), and the influence of foreigners, and that they now must clean-up their collective act; at a time, moreover, when the Gestapo patrolled the streets and the best way to stay out of trouble was to blend in with everyone else, les zazous went out of their way to look and behave differently, with a difference that could only be considered decadent and foreign. They might be seen, in defiantly claiming their freedom to be different, to have constituted a kind of resistance. Perhaps the most striking example of their tongue in cheek defiance came when French Jews were ordered to prominently display a yellow star of David with the word 'Juif' a tall times. Somezazousmadeandopenlywore
36
!foucau[t:
yellows stars of their own. And in the centre they had written the word 'swing' (Thoumieux-Rioux 1993:32-9). Such resistance involves not only indiscipline and disorder, but the shortcircuiting of the panoptic machine. Instead of fearing the gaze of the society of surveillance the zazous welcome it, they ask to be seen, to be noticed, so that they might thumb their noses. This is the kind of resistance without ideology which questions our notions of what is political. Just as those notions are questioned by the type of freedom achieved through failure and the subversion of power through humour expressed in the works of Samuel Beckett. 1
2
Lottman concludes, however, that there were significant differences between letters of denunciation under the Occupation and during the purge. The former were often anonymous, while Lottman shows that, officially, at least, under the purge the letters had to be signed, and states that these letters were generally treated with caution by the courts (Lottman, 1986:77, 149). From Bair, 1990:320-366, and Bernold 1992:26.
3
It is easy enough to call upon Foucault in support of the supposition that personal
4
5
history is important to the work of a writer -perhaps surprisingly, as his name has been liked to often obscurely defined notions of the 'death' of the author. It is important to note that Foucault discussed not an actual death or disappearance, but the history of the concept of the author. Firstly, in the period for questions immediately after his paper, 'What is an Author' he said, in discussing 'the death of man': 'This is a theme that allows me to bring to light the ways in which the concept of man is dead; it is a matter of seeing in what manner, according to what rule, the concept of man was formed and has functioned. I have done the same thing for the notion of the author. So let's hold the tears' (Eribon 1991:210). Theproblemisneatlydiffused by Blanchot: 'itisacceptedasacertainty that Foucault, adhering in this to a certain conception of literary production, got rid ot purely and simply, the notion of the subject: no more oeuvre, no more author, no more creative unity. But things are not that simple. The subject does not disappear; rather its excessively determined unity is put in question. What arouses interest and inquiry is its disappearance (that is, the new manner of being which disappearance is), or rather its dispersal' (Blanchot 1990:76). Speaking about Raymond Roussel in the interview given in 1983 Foucault states, 'someone that is a writer doesn't simply create his work in his books,in whathepublishes... in the end it's himself writing his books. And it's this relationship between he and his books ... which is the central point. .. The work is more than the work: the writing subject is part of the work' (Ruas 1985:104). It is this effectwhichithas in common with all disciplines,'The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law. They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities' (Foucault 1991:222). On the state attitude to vagabonds during the Occupation see White, 1993:273274, 'during the Occupation a new law was introduced, primarily for political reasons, but also to solve the problem presented by petty thieves, multiple offenders and the homeless. This law, created on 15 October 1941, allowed the state to place in an 'administrative internment' anyone considered a threat to national security or anyone who could not prove he or she had a profession, a residence or a legal means of gaining a living. '
6
The 'free zone' was invaded by the Nazis soon after Beckett and Suzanne crossed over, on 11 November, 1942 (Rousso 1992:182).
7
My thanks to Jerome Lindon for permission to quote from this text. French
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original is as follows: T ai toujours voulu etre libre. Je ne sais pas pourquoi. Je ne saisnon plus ce que <;a veut dire, etre libre ... Mais loin des mots je sais ce que c'est.' 8
French original as follows: 'Victor (Avec incoherence): Vous acceptez qu'on depasse la vie, ou qu' elle vous depasse, qu' on devienne irreductible, aconditon d'y mettre le prix, de deposer sa liberte. 11 a abdique, il est mort, il est fou, il a la foi, un sarcome, rien aredire. Mais ne plus etre parmi vous aforce d'etre libre, <;a c'est une honte et un scandale. '
References Bair, Deirdre (1990). Samuel Beckett: A Biography, London: Vintage. Beckett, Samuel (1947). Eleutheria, unpublished typescript, written in French. Held in the Beckett collection, the Rare Books Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. [Typescript consulted April1992]. Translations from this source are mine. __ _, (1954). Letter to Dr. E. Franzen. Quoted in Babel3, [magazine], 1984, Ms 2993 The Samuel Beckett Collection, Archives, UK: The University of Reading. __ _, (1989). Nohow On, London: Calder. __ _, (1976). The Beckett Trilogy, London: Picador. Bemold, Andre (1992). L'amitie de Beckett: 1979-1989. Paris: Hermann. Translations from this source are mine. Blanchot, Maurice (1990). 'Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him'. Foucault/Blanchot, trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Zone. Eribon, Didier (1991). Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Foucault, Michel (1991). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin. Lacouture, Jean (1990). De Gaulle. Volume 1: The Rebel 1890-1944, trans. Patrick O'Brian, London: Collins Harvill. __ _, (1991). De Gaulle. Volume 2: The Ruler,1945-1970. Trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Harvill. Lottman, Herbert R. (1986). The People's Anger: Justice and Revenge in Post-Liberation France, London: Hutchinson. Ophuls, Marcel (1975). The Sorrow and the Pity: The Text and Illustrations from the Marcel Ophuls Film, trans. Mireille Johnson, London: Paladin. Rousso, Henry (1992). Les annees noires: vivre sous l'Occupation. Paris: GallimardDecouvertes. __ _, (1991). The Vichy Syndrome: history and memory in France since 1944. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ruas, Charles (1985). 'Archeologie d'une passion' [interview with Michel Foucault], in Magazine litteraire, numero 221, juillet-aout. pp.100-5. Translations from this source are mine. Thournieux-Rioux, Emmanuelle (1993). 'Les Zazous, Enfants terribles de Vichy'. L'Histoire, No. 165, April, Paris, pp.32-9. White, Edmund (1993). Genet, London: Chatto and Windus. Wylie, Laurence (1974). Village in the Vaucluse. Third edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
The Memoir, The Corpse and the Bad Judge: Foucault and Bataille
The Bloody Memoir In his essay on Bataille, 'A Preface to Transgression', Foucault (1977:30)
writes: 'Profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred- is this not more or less what we may call transgression?' Perhaps this was never more true than in the mid-nineteenth century France of Pierre Riviere, when transgression, in the form of the apparently religiously inspired slaughter of one's own family, could be defined solely in the terms of a medico-legal discourse surrounding the emergent concept of 'monomania'. Through the course of the documents arranged more or less chronologically by Foucault in I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother ... , the almost ritual killing performed by Riviere is subjected to the attempt to transform it from an inhuman act of abject monstrosity into a symptom, from a cry exceeding the bounds of rationality into the contained object of reason itself. The sacred violence of Riviere's act is reduced to the profanity of madness (for example), to that which justifies and engenders the restricted transgression of the taboos against the taking of life and the violation of the sanctity of motherhood, while leaving them intact and secure. 'For example': in a certain way, this phrase might be said to characterise Foucault's project in general, as one which has served 'to constitute series: to define the elements proper to each series, to fix its boundaries, to reveal its own specific types of relations, to formulate its laws, and, beyond this, to describe the relations between different series' (Foucault 1969:7-8). Each of those' discursive formations' which it has been Foucault's exemplary task to have analysed, is an example of the general phenomenon of discontinuous serialisation, yet none serves to illustrate a model as such: there is no generalisable form of the discursive formation. Nevertheless, discursive formations are recognisable as such, to the extent that lists of them may be drawn up, as Foucault often does: medicine, political economy, biology, grammar, etc. 'Etc'. is, as Alan Liu (1990:86) suggests, 'a trope of inexpressibility' that calls upon the possibility of generalisation and of example, which exceeds the chance of ever actually nominating the precise extent of the generality and the string of examples to which it refers. This Foucault knows better than anyone else: four times, in the chapter in The Archaeology of Knowledge on 'Discursive Formations', he attempts (or makes a show of attempting), to provide a general hypothesis which would explain and provide for the unity of the discursive formation, and each time a contrary example leads him to discard the hypothesis. In the place where he 'expects' to find the grounds for each (unity of object, style, concept or
39
theme), as if he were attempting a'synecdochic redemption' of 'the etc. from the wasteland of endless syntagm' (Liu 1990:86), Foucault finds instead a series of divisions and dispersions, discontinuities and transformations, and the possibility for determining the various ways in which these are regulated. The example opens a chasm within itself between two functions which are never separable - it is specific, unique, what is given before all generalisation as the possibility of its elaboration, and is at the same time permanently inscribed in the series which constitutes each of its elements according to a rule of 'positive' complementarity. It is across the division of each example from itself that Foucault traces the relations of the discursive formation - what remains to be thought when one has exhausted the potential of the relations of object, style, concept and theme and so on; that is, what remains when one is presented with the example that does not fit the model it was supposed to exemplify, are the differential relations which allow one to speak of this or that example, and which at once render it inoperable in its proper place. It is thus that Deleuze writes of Foucault: 'For the archivist deliberately refuses to give examples. He believes that he never stopped giving them in the past, even if at the time he was unaware that they were examples'. The limited and limiting transgression of the kind expressed as 'profanation in a world which no longer recognises any positive meaning in the sacred', operates within the space of these relations, within the space of the example. Transgression is example, all that can be thought of as transgression takes place as example, as the opening of the chasm in the rule which gives it its place. Everything in the Riviere case points to the exemplary nature of transgression, everything sets up transgression as example - the unusually full documentation of the case, its timing with respect to the regicide case of Fieschi with which it was equated according to the penal code, and with respect to the psychiatric-legal debate concerning the admissibility of concepts such as that of 'monomania'. And at the end of an indeterminate string of circumstances, there is Riviere's memoir. The 'Notes' at the end of the dossier, prepared by Foucault and others, serve to contextualise the proceedings of the case. The documents are not so much analysed as 'placed' - the precise extent to which they function as an example of the juridical function of psychoanalytic discourse in the midnineteenth century is what is at stake - a function of exemplification which is in some way separable from the texts themselves. The 'Notes' are a guide or program for the reader who is invited to watch the drama of juridical power unfold. At the centre of this drama, and at its beginning and end, is the memoir of Riviere, the axis of a centripetal force which determines throughout the motion and fate of each of the players. As such, it is left entirely without interpretation or 'any psychiatric or psychoanalytic commentary', for three reasons which Foucault states in his Foreword: first, because it serves as the 'zero benchmark' according to which the other discourses are situated and the relationships between them gauged. Second, and I think that this can be reduced to the first, because the editors did not wish to embroil it in one or more of the discourses whose operation it was supposed to throw into relief:
!foucau[t:
40
Thirdly, and most importantly, owing to a sort of reverence and perhaps, too, terror for a text which was to carry off four corpses along with it [Riviere suicided in prison shortly after his reprieve from the death sentence], we were unwilling to superimpose our own text on Riviere's memoir. We fell under the spell of the parricide with the reddish-brown eyes (Foucault 1973:xiii; emphasis added).
With the slash of the pruning bill that opens up the bodies of his mother, his sister, and his brother, Riviere also opens up the exemplary space which almostswallowshim. He is divided along the axis oftheexamplewhichruns between uniqueness and generality, he is dispersed among the various subjectivities constituted by juridical and medical discourses, he is transformed into the 'case' he always was. Remember, the division, dispersion and transformation of Riviere (for example) is what enables Foucault to make his decision, to identify the psychiatric-judicial discursive formation in operation here. But in order to do this, he must identify Riviere's 'other' transgression, he must separate from 'Riviere-the-example' what is proper to him, what makes him exemplary- the memoir. Foucault's project in I, Pierre Riviere, the partial archaeology of a discursive formation constituted by the statements of the Paris specialists in response to the memoir, rests upon this thing to which he can articulate no reply, which holds him entirely in its thrall: 'It was simply the beauty of Riviere's memoir ['that led us to spend more than a year on these documents']. The utter astonishment it produced in us was the starting point' (Foucault 1973:x). What remains of Riviere beyond the example, beyond the profanation of the analytic krinein, is the terror, reverence and astonishment produced at the moment of an encounter with the sacred.
Burnt Offerings Georges Bataille's The Trial of Gilles de Rais appears to offer itself in comparison with Foucault's work. It too presents the record of a trial, or more precisely, of two trials, ecclesiastical and secular, which mirrors the account of Riviere's doubled trial, split between the legal and the medical. It also provides an introduction, 'The Tragedy of Gilles de Rais', and an'Analysis of Historical Facts', which, while appearing before the trial documents, performs much the same function as the 'Notes' appended to Riviere's case. However, any comparison of the events themselves, strictly speaking, must end there. Riviere and de Rais were each tried for murder, to be sure, but the scale of their respective crimes and the motives for them are separated immeasurably. Riviere was a nineteenth-century peasant who suffered what he, and indeed the authorities, saw as the torments inflicted upon his father by his mother as a kind of religious crisis; de Rais a medieval lord of fantastic wealth and military power, lieutenant to Joan of Arc until her martyrdom, whose spiritual torments appear of an altogether different order than Riviere's, at least to the authorities of the time, and seemingly occur less as the cause of his crimes than as their adjunct. Gilles de Rais is only ever on the verge of transgression. His world, that of the end of feudalism, still recognises a positive value in the sacred, still places a degree of faith in the value of sacred objects. What Gilles de Rais
41
represents is a monstrous profanation. He and his accomplices are indicted, before the ecclesiastical tribunal, for having killed, cut the throats of, and massacred many innocent children in an inhuman fashion, and with them committed, against nature, the abominable and execrable sin of sodomy, in various fashions and with unheard-of perversions that cannot presently be expounded by reason of their horror, but that will be disclosed in Latin at the appropriate time and place; ... [for having] often and repeatedly practised the dreadful invocation of demons and took care that it be practised; ... [for having] sacrificed and made offerings to these same demons, contracted with them; and wickedly perpetrated other crimes and offences, professing doctrinal heresy in offence against Divine Majesty, in the subversion and distortion of our faith, offering a pernicious example unto many. (Bataille 1965:150-1).
The charges brought by the secular court are similar with respect to the murders, and add Rais' seizure of the fortress ofSaint-Etienne-de-Mermorte, which he had not long before sold to Geoffroy Le Ferron, the treasurergeneral of Brittany. The differences between these separate indictments and the grounds upon which the proceedings are conducted are crucial, and summed up in the following exchange. The high secular magistrate attendant at the ecclesiastical hearings interrupts Rais' first confession, and demands that Rais reveal his motives - who had persuaded him, who had instructed him in the techniques of his atrocities, and to what end. Rais can only reply that they were committed of his own accord, at his own instruction and for his own pleasure. To the magistrate's reasoned disbelief and insistence, Rais responds: 'Truly, there was no other cause, no other end nor intention, if not what I've told you: I've told you greater things than this and enough to kill ten thousand men' (Bataille 1965:187). The confession to a crime whose only motive is its own fulfilment, and of which Rais considers himself limitlessly guilty, is the measure of his profanity. To the Church, it is enough that he is a monster; in fact, it demands that this be the case. To the state on the other hand, Rais must be what will later come to be known as a delinquent, an example of a type, whose criminal formation may be identified and generalised, and a category to which we shall return. It is not so simple as this, of course- we are yet in the early days of the separation of the powers of Church and state, and the division which has never really succeeded in separating profanation from transgression has barely even begun its institution. Gilles de Rais' attempts to maintain the sovereignty of his uncalculated extravagance- his numerous fortresses, his glorious retinue, his private army, his magnificent theatrical reproductions of the siege of Orleans- by means of war, theft, alchemy, pacts with the devil, sacrifices and the like, are attempts to transcend the limitations of the profane world, and to achieve the realm of the sacred. In pursuit of this end, of this end of ends, no means could remain simply a means -from the start, Rais' crimes escalate towards ends in themselves, expressing in themselves the subordination of all else. To place oneself on a footing with God is Evil; and yet, in not being God, Evil is profane. The temporal power of the Christian Church rests, at least in part, on this paradox; it allows the Church
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to punish, in this world, crimes against the next. For the Church, then, Rais must be a monster: he must be the embodiment, in a single terrible figure, of the sacred paradox which, if it is to remain inviolate, must be consumed whole in the flames of the execution-pyre. But even for the Church, Rais offers 'a pernicious example'. And as we have seen, to exemplify is to transgress, which is precisely not to be a monster- it is to establish, in the act of exceeding it, the law that makes one a subject. It is to be mad, it is to be criminal, it is even to be saintly, but it is not to be a monster. However, the secular magistrate can find no grounds upon which to establish Rais' madness or even his delinquency, and in frustration turns him back over to the clerics, who may now content themselves with the details of Rais' damnation. Except for the question of his remains. Despite Rais' monstrosity, despite the fact that he resists the analytical division that would make of him a case, Rais' hanged body is not burnt to ashes, as are those of two of his closest accomplices. 'Before the flames could open his body and entrails, it was drawn away and his body placed in a coffin and carried inside the Carmelite church of Nantes, where it was buried' (Bataille 1965:279). Rais' soul is consecrated to God's will, while his material, transgressive body is returned to the earth- no longer a monster, Rais is, at the last moment, restored to the order of things. Bataille's study of Gilles de Rais is the study of a 'sacred monster', who 'represents in a pure state the impulse that tends to subordinate the activity of men to enchantment' (Bataille 1965:38), an impulse which is the basis of many, if not all, ofBataille's works. But just as for the ChurchRais fails at the last instant to unify the sacred and the profane, Bataille finds himself confronted with the insistence of Rais' shattered remains. What has come back to him is the impossibility of absolute sovereignty, the impossibility of the situation he has represented, and that Gilles de Rais is given to have represented. And yet, it is precisely here that we can see the sense of which Bataille speaks when he says: 'Indeed I think that in a sense my narratives clearly attain the impossible', in his preface to the book of that name (Bataille 1965:9). He cannot attain this extreme simply by representing it, for as he says elsewhere: 'Through language we can never grasp what matters to us, for it eludes us in the form of interdependent propositions, and no central whole to which each of these can be referred ever appears' (Bataille 1957:274). Given all that remains left to language, Bataille attains the impossible by exemplifying it, by allowing the remains to resonate in the empty space of transgression, by allowing Rais to exhaust himself to death in the role which he plays all too well.
Judging Distances At the end of our parallel investigations, we are left to face two apparently contradictory remains- on the one hand, Pierre Riviere's astonishing and indecipherable memoir, and on the other Gilles de Rais' slightly charred but eminently recognisable corpse. Nevertheless, the importance of each is the result of a decision, a separation, the putting of a certain distance between the force of the analysis and the remains of the object; which is to say it is the
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result of the interposition of the experience of the object as remains. In this way we can speak of a particular physics of the critical exercise. The memoir provides Foucault with the sacred basis of his analysis of the discursive formation of transgression, a basis which is instituted in the form of terror, reverence and astonishment, the emotive markers of a singular experience which places the memoir beyond the space of exemplification; an experience of distance which determines the moment of the relationship between analysis and object. If this distance is too great, the moment is high, and the analysis is overwhelmed by the remains - we find ourselves in the position of the secular magistrate whose efforts to master Rais' motives and ultimately his body are in vain, until the very end. If the distance is not great enough, however, we take on the role of the Paris specialists who diagnose Riviere's madness on the strength of his memoir and a few depositions. For Foucault, then, the krinein at the root of criticism- or perhaps more precisely, the krino, the 'I judge' which is also the 'I separate' - is a matter of skill, of having a surveyor's eye capable of discerning the critical distance: in short, of having the practice or the experience at the work. The reverential experience of the distance required for the judging of the object, for the practice of criticism, is an ineffable experience. It takes place in silence, or very nearly so -at those strange moments when we hear it speak, we hear it as a rupture in the fabric of theoretical or philosophical discourse- it is, above all, an interior experience. The eruption of the remains as the mark of a barely containable experience of the impossible does not only occur in I, Pierre Riviere, wherein it might easily be considered, along with the rest of the text, as an aberration never to be repeated by this otherwise exemplary historian/philosopher. At one such moment in Discipline and Punish, Foucault opposes Bentham's design for the Panopticon to the roughly contemporary engravings of Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione. These engravings hark back to the vivid descriptions of the torture and dismemberment of criminals that Foucault cites in his early chapters; scenes which give way to those of the non-corporal correction of prisoners' souls through a constant surveillance which enables the finetuning of punishment according to emergent disciplinary sciences. In pitching these two designs together, Foucault is merely representing two ideals, illustrating the extreme ends of the punitive spectrum: 'the ruined prisons,littered with mechanisms of torture', and 'the cruel, ingenious cage ... a pure architectural and optical system' (Foucault 1975:205). But the text, as a whole, traces the historical movement from one to the other: from the spectacle of the excessive and monstrous to the invisibility of the clinically humane and insidious. Piranesi's engravings- prepared only some thirty years before Bentham's plans- are barely mentioned, apparently dismissed as archaic, out of sync with an age that could construct the Millbank Penitentiary in London, and shortly thereafter, many others of similarly inspired design in Europe and America. And yet, these engravings are the site of a return of the remains that we have already seen trouble Foucault's judgment- a kind of repressed grandeur of the prisoner of old, shackled but proudly bearing the taunts or humbly accepting the praises of the feudal crowd, the nobility of criminality which he does not hesitate to resurrect
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even in the midst of his penultimate chapter, and at some length (seven pages), in the figure of the chain-gang. Again, it is the Panopticon which restores the continuity of the narrative; this time in the form of its 'mobile equivalent' (Foucault 1975:263). The 'Imaginary Prison' and the chain-gang represent, in a sense, the unconscious of the Panopticon, the subterranean force whose repression is the birth of the modern carceral. Piranesi, who seems to have spewed these images in great haste directly onto the stone as if in the thrall of some demonic apparition, has struck the chord of an imperative force, at once grotesque and magnificent, which drives Bentham, in his need to rid himself of what remains of the criminal, to expel all excess, violence and madness from the pure functionality of his architectural superego. Bentham's need is not Foucault's: the latter is manifestly not intent on excluding the remains, since it is precisely the impossibility of doing so which is the measure of his exemplary judgment. Bataille's judgment is not good. Or rather, for Bataille, the question of judgment is not relevant to 'what matters to us'. What matters to us is the object itself, or, more correctly, what matters is that the object is no longer an object, that the remains are no longer a matter of judgment. Inner experience is not to be revered as a sacred thing carefully maintained at an optimum distance for maximum effect, and its silence does not take the form of a calculated interruption of the continuity of language. It is language allowed to play itself out, to exhaust itself to the point of death in the distance of the remains. Not the objectifying distance between two things, but the distance outside the remains which makes of it an inside - the distance of transgression. The effects of Bataille's confrontation with the silence of inner experience are disseminated throughout his work- his analyses of Marx, Nietzsche, and above all Hegel are, quite literally, exhaustive: they bear the full weight of philosophy in all its work, even picking up what philosophy leaves behind it, and finding in this its exemplification. At these points, where philosophy has tried to extend its limits and fill silence with its talk, Bataille finds the possibility for a philosophy of transgression which is not fixated upon itself as a limit as if from the outside, but which is concerned to experience itself as a limit, to draw the distance that separates it from itself within the flesh of the philosopher - I use this term 'flesh' to draw what I think is a pertinent link with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty- and to experience this distance as a continuity of being. This collection is dedicated, of course, to Michel Foucault, and so it only seems fair to cast my last tentative words in his direction. I opened with a brief citation from' A Preface to Transgression', and I would certainly be the first to admit that I have done no more than he in his reading of Bataille, and have merely played the cunning, if cliched, barrister in turning his own words against him. Nevertheless, the worst I have done is show that Foucault is too good a reader of Bataille, that his critical judgment is too sharp - I trust that this is something of which I will not be accused, since it seems that despite my good intentions, and against my better judgment, my final word, far from reaching Foucault, has fallen back to me.
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Works Cited Bataille, Georges (1957). Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. __ _, (1962). The Impossible: 'A Story of Rats' followed by 'Dianus' and by 'The Oresteia'. Trans. Robert Hurley (1991). San Francisco: City Lights. __ _, (1965). The Trial of Gilles de Rais. Trans. Richard Robinson (1991 ). Los Angeles: Amok. Foucault, Michel (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1972). London: Tavistock. __ _, (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (1979). London: Penguin. __ _, (ed.) (1973). I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother... A Case ofParricide in the nineteenth Century. Trans. FrankJellinek (1982). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. __ _, (1977). 'A Preface to Transgression'. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon Bouchard (eds).lthaca: Cornell University Press. Liu, Alan (1990). 'Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail', Representations, 32:75-113.
The Body and Violence: The Subject of Knowledge in Dostoesvky's The Brothers Karamazov and Foucault's Analytic of Finitude Sfo6o~ iJ/Uu!i:o-(jfooer In positing non-representability as the essence of discursive language,
Foucault reverses the Classicist relation between finitude and the infinite.l This reversal signals the emergence of a new cultural paradigm, whose historical origins Foucault locates at the end of the eighteenth century (but which can shift as far back as the mid-seventeenth century in Foucault's analysis of the 'gaze' in Valasquez' Las Meninas). Non-representational discourse, which constitutes the new paradigm, coincides with the' death of God' and the emergence, in God's stead, of the signifier or the doublet called 'man'.2 This new man is, in fact, a sibling of Nietzsche's Superman, who represents the first 'historical' manifestation of the embodied signifier 'man'. Man, this newly discovered entity in the universe of knowledge and things, himself exists in a 'hollowed out' space, which is the effect of a withdrawal of things and words back upon themselves, presumably into tautologies of their own. Although he is now on the outside of things and words, man is the 'principle and means of all production'.3 But this sovereign position is deceptive. For man's concrete existence is determined by 'labour, life and language': 'It is possible to have access to him only though his words, his organism, the objects he makes - as though it is they who possess the truth in the first place ... '.4 Man's finitude is linked to knowledge. For man's finitude is 'in the positivity of his knowledge'.s It is the gaze which appears in this new discursive space of modernity in order to chain man's knowledge to the field of the profane (the atheistic, the desecrated, the trivial, the simple object etc.). The'death of God', which opens up the field of the profane, reconstitutes the sphere of knowledge, whose founding structure is now the 'split' between the signifier and the signified (the separation of Man and God), which leads to the effective exclusion or repression of the signified ('God'). As a consequence of this separation, Foucault sees the emergence of new cultural institutions: modem science, based on observation of the facts, becomes institutionalised as the new method of truth or knowledge. With these symptomatic manifestations of the new episteme, Western knowledge moves out of the Classical sphere of representation, naming and classification into the sphere of the gaze- which is in the first instance the 'clinical gaze'. The gaze is complicit, in tum, with the oedipalisation of consciousness, which, in tum, produces a culture of scientism and 'intellectualism' (to borrow the latter term from Bakhtin).
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In his own analytic method, Foucault attempts to 'transcend' the gaze by overcoming the constraints of the oedipalised perspective of all knowledge. He tries this (at a 'limit', almost whimsically pushing deconstruction to the brink of discursiveness) in Madness and Civilisation (1961), where he is motivated by the desire to 'speak from the point of view' of that which is excluded from knowledge- knowledge's Other- namely madness. According to Derrida, the enterprise fails, in part. In the essay 'Cogito and the History of Madness' Derrida argues that it is impossible to speak from the locus of 'madness', which is not a discourse, which does not have a discourse with which it speaks.6 Derrida is right, of course, if madness is taken at face value and therefore understood to mean what it says. However, if madness is taken as metaphor -a metaphor of the Other of History, then Foucault's analytic method is analogous to the aesthetic method of twentieth century literature, from Artaud and Kafka to Blanchot and Joyce, and twentieth century art, from Surrealism to Russian Conceptualism. What is true for the literature of the absurd as much as for Russian Conceptualist art is the shift of the field of representation to the other side of language- to the area which in language is occupied by the Other, which is to say, by silence,- the space of the Other. This space is also the space below the bar of repression- the space, into which the absent signified (God) has been banned. In this literature, either silence or madness speak. The relationship of madness to knowledge is explored in the last novel of the last of the great nineteenth century novelists - namely in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, completed in 1881, the year of Dostoevsky's death. In this novel, of the four Karamazov brothers it is Ivan Karamazov (IK) who is assigned the role of the privileged carrier of both madness and knowledge.
Ivan Karamazov, Violence, Finitude and Knowledge IKhas always attracted the special attention of commentators of Dostoevsky's novel. This is because he is a more complex fictional character than any of the other Karamazov brothers. It is not that he says more than the others; in fact, in terms of his 'on stage' lines of dialogue, he probably says less in dialogic exchanges than even his bastard brother Smerdiakov. IK appears mysterious not only to the reader, but also to the characters within the novel. Thus, Alyosha Karamazov (AK) and Dimitry Karamazov (DK) describe IK variously as 'a cypher' (zagdka), 'silent grave' ('Ivan- mogila') and a 'sphynx'. Apart from such explicit descriptions, elaborated by those of the narrator, IK is rarely seen in action in the course of the narrative. He plays a passive role as a guest at the monastery in Book Two, merely accompanying Fyodor Karamazov (FK) in silent disdain. He is the only son who lives with the father in the same house, but there, too, we see him only coming in or going out and never really in interaction with FK. We wonder why, if he is as intelligent as the narrator says he is, this sort of a 'man' would want to reside in the Karamazov house of ill-repute and why, if he is financially so independent, he does not live in independent lodgings? Unlike AK and Mme Hokhlakova, who are observers on the scene, we fail to see IK's
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'youthfulness' emerge at the moment of being rejected by Katarina Ivanovna (KI), which prompts his sardonic outburst about her 'cruelty'. IK's intelligence also seems to fail him in his relationship with Smerdiakov, in which the lackey appears to be 'leading the dance' and leading IK up the garden path or by the nose. IK is dreadfully slow to comprehend the 'game' of Smerdiakov, and instead feels nauseated by, without being able to resist, the 'lure', which this sly peasant prepares for him. IK's alleged derangement ('belaia goriachka') after Smerdiakov's 'confession' and suicide also has the flavour of melodrama or a deus ex machina device to 'end' the plot. Altogether, IK is the most elusive of the Karamazov brothers and the one least able to be grasped through a Realist poetics. However, if IK is not 'read' through the poetics of Realism- and Dostoevsky himself insisted that he was not an ordinary Realist, but a 'realist in a higher sense',- theniKbecomes that element in the structure of the entire novet which leads to the synthesis of all the propositions laid before the reader through the other brothers and the father /mothers, and one which contains the ultimate solution to the epistemological and philosophical questions posed in and by the narrative. The question which is ultimately posed by Dostoevsky's novel is the phenomenological question of the relationship of the human subject to Being. But here we have time to explore only the subsidiary question to the question of Being- which is the question of the relationship of the subject of language to language and knowledge. What IK professes to know (at least in word if not deed) is the difference between 'knowledge' and 'understanding' or 'comprehension'. Despite his rejection of 'understanding', IK does appear to comprehend the fundamental finitude of language and being. This is the gist of his otherwise startling revelation to AK that he will call life quits at 30. Since IK is not at any point suicidal, this proclamation, which can never be tested or proven (for it goes beyond the text of the novel), must be read as a metaphor of finitude. Finally, IK also appears to comprehend the ultimate founding tautology of language, as well as the negativity or nothingness which supports it. This all emerges in a conversation he has with AK in the tavern, just before the recounting of his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. What IK cannot do is translate this knowledge into his own plot action. In other words, his words and his deeds are powered by two different sources of energy and it is his deeds which remain inexplicable for himself and for the reader, rendering IK at once the most knowing and the most opaque subject/ character of the novel- the split subject of knowledge par excellence. While IK takes his child-abuse stories (violence to the body) to be unassailable evidence of evil in the world, the presence of which entitles him to rebellion- not against God or the Father (the phallus is preserved!) but against God's world, the reader is within his right to interpret this rebellion, in the context of IK's episodes with the Devil, not as a 'metaphysical rebellion', but as an affirmation of the principle of negativity. IK says as much himself when he acts as advocatus diaboli (or a metonymy of his Devil) before AK, who castigates himself for having said 'an absurd thing' with reference to the shooting of the squire who had the little boy torn to shreds by his hunting dogs:
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'What I said was absurd, but -' 'Yes, but- that's the trouble, isn't it, that but.. .' cried Ivan. 'Let me tell you, my novice, that absurdities ['neleposti'] are only too necessary on earth. The world is founded on absurdities and perhaps without them nothing would come to pass in it. We know that we know.' [my translation].
There are two problems with Magarshack's English translation of this passage. Firstly, the English 'absurd', which translates the Russian nelepost, does not have the same sound of negativeness because it lacks the negative particle which prefixes the word in Russian. 'Non-sense' would have been closer to the Russian, while retaining the meaning of'absurd'. Secondly, the last line of IK's speech is mistranslated by Magarshack. Ivan's statement in the original is a tautology carried by an ironic intonation. Magarshack preserves the irony, but loses the tautology by placing the ironic accent on the relative pronoun chto, to the detriment of the true meaning of the passage.Ivan'sprecisewordingis:'Weknowthatweknow!'[Myznaem,chto znaem/Sifchtowereaccentedintheoriginal,itwouldbemarkedbyadiacritic comma, and would mean 'what' - as an interrogative pronoun in the accusative case. Since it is not marked in any Russian edition, it does not mean 'what' but 'that' as a relative pronoun, it is one of the syncategoremata of the Russian language. That means, the passage must be read as follows: if the world (Being) remained without negation, without Non-Being or NonSense as its dialectical 'other', consciousness would always be, in Hegel's words, 'selfsame', 'in-and-for-itself'. So the split in consciousness, which produces man's awareness of knowledge and of himself, would be impossible and would render non-existent the founding tautology of language, expressed with self-lacerating irony by the rebellious Ivan in 'We know that we know!' This foundational tautology of knowledge, which is the only support of the subject of knowledge, irks Ivan. This is because he knows the difference between 'knowing' (znat) and 'understanding' or'comprehending' (ponimat), but finds 'understanding' beyond reach. He intimates as much in his asymmetrical retort to the next question, put to him by AK, who misunderstands IK's preceding statement about 'We know that we know!' SoAK asks: 'Whatdoyouknow?'TowhichiKreplieswithanon-sequitur:'Iunderstand nothing', Ivan continued as if raving .. .'9 Then IK invokes 'facts', which he opposes to 'understanding'. He asserts that he had decided a long time ago that he did 'not want to understand anything'. 'Understanding' will, he claims, 'betray the facts', and he, Ivan, wants to remain with the 'facts'. It is thus 'understanding' or'comprehending' which he has given up- evidently grudgingly. And it is this nostalgia for 'understanding', this yearning for the transcendental signified, which he knows to be unattainable, which constitutes IK's structuring ambivalence as a character. But this yearning for the transcendental signified has no outlet, except as desire of the Other. The drama of ambivalence as desire of the Other is played out by the womenby KI in the first instance, who is DK's fiance, torn between the two brothers as the desire of the 'other' brother. But IK's ambivalence as a character does not end here. As well as being ambivalent, IK is both 'blind' in a certain sense and an' absence' in the same
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sense as his Devil. We see very little of IK in the novel, compared to the other brothers. And yet IK seems to be ubiquitous and on everyone's lips. He seems to have a 'guarding' function in relation to Fyodor Karamazov and it is only through IK's intentional and premeditated absence that the obstacle to the murder of the father is removed. His ubiquity is not of a spatial, but of a spatio-temporal variety, which constitutes an absolute anteriority. He is otherwise the most fixed or static of characters. Whereas both Alyosha Karamazov and Dimitry Karamazov traverse space, IK is always already on the spot of action, as a silent witness most of the time. He speaks only in three or four significant moments of his 'static' plot existence. His most extensive speech is on the subject of rejection of 'God's world'. This is strange for a scientist, whoisotherwise,hetellsus,interestedin the'facts' only. He is thus an observer of 'facts', almost a modern 'archaeologist' (like Foucault) or a bricoleur (like Levi-Strauss or Derrida). He collects facts, and is seen by Alyosha Karamazov' on the bench' near the garden gate, writing them down in his notebook. These two sides of IK - 'rejection of the world' and observation or collection of 'facts' (of the world) are actually complementary aspects of a paradigm, which is posited in The Brothers Karamazov as a type of discursive knowledge. It is the same paradigm, which Foucault has identified in Western discourse at the end of the eighteenth century, when Classical discourse, dominated by 'essences' and 'idealities', was replaced by a discourse of the gaze. Foucault sees this moment in European culture give birth to the institution of the clinic, with the 'clinical gaze' representing the paradigm of modern positivist science of the nineteenth century. This new, post-Revolutionary 'medical discourse' is modelled by IvanKaramazov. It is a discourse which has moved out of the field of 'experience' into a relational field, scanned by the gaze, and situated both in 'real' and 'discursive' space. The 'real space' of this discourse is made up by a 'conglomerate of discourses, social pressures' and an 'ensemble of practices', 10 situated in the real and pre-conditioning the gaze, making up its 'concrete a-priori'. This means that the classical gaze ventures 'outside the "circle of knowledge" of the ideal types and natural history... ' 11 and moves into the world. This world is the world of the social, the political as well as the world of concrete facts. Medicine- which models this new relationship to 'facts', now moves into a public arena- a 'social "space", which is that of 'the nation's health'.12 The new 'medical discourse' of the late eighteenth century is a perfect model for the new 'scientific' (we could almost say proto-'structuralist') discourse, which is constituted by IK's researching and collecting of the 'facts' of the 'Russian national life' of the 1860s in its social and familial aspects. The most prominent of these 'facts' are IK's 'case histories' of child abuse and violence in the family. His child-abuse anecdotes, of which he has collected many more than he has time to recount to Alyosha Karamazov in the tavern, represent 'facts' found in this newly discovered social space. IK develops a philosophy of the discourse of this social space. This is couched in his article on the relationship of Church and state, which he summarises at the gathering in Zosima's cell in Book Two. His article is a polemic with a recently (actually) published book by a Russian theologian,13 who is a
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champion of the reforms of the Russian legal system in the early 1860s, in particular the new system of juries, which are supposed to accord the condemned man a fairer and more democratic trial. What IK argues is that it is wrong to try the criminal by a 'worldly' court in the first place. In order for true justice to be exercised, the transgressor should be handed over to an 'ecclesiastical' court, which would mete out punishment without 'excluding' the criminal from the 'whole' of the church's flock. The mere awareness of his transgression would be enough punishment for the man who has sinned, if he knew that the Mother Church still loved him and considered him to be her 'son'. Because of the love which is not withdrawn from him, he would be motivated to repent and reform. Even hardened criminals are said by IK to respond to love and to turn abject in the face of forgiveness of their sins. IK's quasi-utopian vision of a unified social body- the 'nation'is remarkably similar to the 'medical field' as Foucault sees it at the end of the eighteenth century, which in turn bears structural similarities to the concept of Hegel's modern state. This 'social space' consists of, in Foucault's words, 'a form homogeneous in each of its regions, constituting a set of equivalent items capable of maintaining constant relations with their entirety, a space of free communication in which the relationship of the part to the whole was always transposable and reversible'. 14 What IK is arguing, in his alleged polemic on the relationship of Church and state, is the impossibility of reconciling two absolutes. He even says, in his somewhat cryptic and not entirely logical preamble to the discussion of his article at the Monastery in Part One, that two 'essences', that of 'the Church' and that of 'the state', will always be 'confused' although a true 'mingling' or a 'compromise' will never be possible. The reason for this incompatibility is, according to IK's analysis, the fact that' a lie' underwrites the 'foundations of the whole thing'. This is an early allusion to the 'lie' which will later be identified with his Devil and with the Devil's analytic of negativity. What IK proposes, in the place of the solution of 'his contemporary theologians', is a model in which the Church is not separated from the state, allocated a separate place at the margins of the state, but is allowed to 'absorb' the state and thus become one all-inclusive generality. What IK proposes is, in fact, a relational social model, which unifies the general and the particular in a non-hierarchical structure. In this level playing-field, the particular parts are 'absorbed' 15 into the general and become indistinguishable from the sum of the whole; each part is, as it were, deprived of individuality and reduced to a pure signifier. Only signifiers (or 'citizens') exist in a 'level' relational playing-field, in which their positions are indefinitely interchangeable, through metonymy: for one signifier always signifies another. The social model, proposed by IK, is thus a replica of the model of perception, based on the logic of the signifier, which structures Dostoevsky's novel and its world-view as a whole. What determines the endlessly open system of semiosis, modelled by IK's Church/ state paradigm, is not only the suspension of the hierarchical relationship (the Master/Servant relationship), but the total absence of identity (as 'essence' or 'quality' or 'value') of the parts within the whole. If an identity is asserted vis-a-vis the social body, it is only by the 'criminal'-
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hence through murder or transgression, which is ultimately - metonymy. But this transgressive act does not lead to exclusion- instead, the identifiable transgressor is pulled back into the field through abjection- an admission of guilt and a public declaration or confession. The confession is literally a stripping or undressing in public- a baring of one's 'essentials' (which amounts to either hysteria or repression) in a public space, witnessed by many. It is easy to see the correspondence of this model of discourse to the structure of the evidentiary plot in The Brothers Karamazov, with Dimitry Karamazov at its centre. It is as if IK's Church/ state hypothesis pre-empts or pre-determines the destiny of Dimitry Karamazov and the structure of his petit roman. What IK advocates is an oedipalised cultural model, in which truth is inquisitorial, obtained by 'torture' of the body. This 'torture' is part of the mastery of the Oedipal system. Torturing others (his brother Alyosha Karamazov and the reader) seems to be IK's modus operendi as well. His relentless pursuit of gory detail upon gory detail of the torture and death of children is his 'epistemological' tool, his way to knowledge. 'Torturing' Dimitry Karamazov seems to be the way to the 'truth' of both the investigating law officers at Mokroe and the trial court. Dimitry Karamazov literally has to take off all his clothes, to expose in full his hairy, virile (phallic) body, before his investigators are satisfied. While in court, after his confession is over, he is wearing new and fashionable outfit, which is in sharp contrast to his pallor and generally subdued demeanour. Having been fully 'exposed', he is crushed by unspecified, diffuse guilt. As a subject, Dimitry Karamazov thus 'disappears', ceding centre stage to appearance. The same inquisitorial method characterises the 'clinical gaze' of the late eighteenth century medical discourse, which becomes for Foucault the model of 'scientific' knowledge of modernity, up to Modernism and Structuralism, but stopping short of Post-structuralism, in which Foucault's own project of knowledge (and incidentally Dostoevsky's avant la lettre) constitutes itself as archaeology and then genealogy. The method of inquiry employed in the model of knowledge, which is structured like a 'clinical gaze', is bound up with the penetration of the 'gaze' 'into the field of signs and symptoms' .16 Such a' clinical' method of 'penetration' into the 'material evidence' of the 'case' of parricide is reproduced, in parodic fashion, by the trial court's method of dealing with the 'facts' in The Brothers Karamazov. For it is a massive collection of 'facts' (uliki- 'material proof'), all pointing in the direction of Dimitry Karamazov as the signified, which condemns him as the murderer. But the same method of penetration 'into the field of signs and symptoms',isalsoduplicated-inallseriousness,asastructuringprinciple-bythe text of the novel on the level of its abstract author. The 'symptom', at which the text's gaze arrives, is always a gap, taking the form, at several points on the printed page, of the punctuation mark of multiple dots. It is in this gap of the 'symptom' that discourse (as metaphor) and, with it, the subject of language and knowledge is constituted, bearing witness to Joseph Kosuth' s proposition that the subject (of knowledge, through whom knowledge is constituted) is 'a punctuation mark'.
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Thus we are led to the inevitable conclusion that while both Foucault and Dostoevsky attempt to distance themselves from the' clinical method' of the gaze, and to seek to penetrate the other of discourse (Dostoevsky through a prosaics of the absurd avant-la-lettre and Foucault by jockeying around madness as a possible entry point to knowledge), both are ultimately committed, despite themselves, to the method of the gaze, which is (for the present) the only possible method of rational discourse. However, this model of knowledge, based on the gaze, has, according to both Foucault and Dostoevsky, one huge drawback. It is bound up with the 'postulate that henceforth the signifier (sign and symptom) would be entirely transparent for the signified, which would appear, without concealment or residue, in its most pristine reality, and that the essence of the signified- the heart of the disease - would be entirely exhausted in the intelligible syntax of the signifier'. 17 This belief in the 'transparency' of the signifier is what accounts for IK's dis-belief in the phenomenon of the Devil, who is both sign and symptom of IK's 'madness', with which IK's quest for knowledge is coeval. The Devil is, objectively, IK's hallucination or delirium. As such, the Devil is of the same order of reality as the orgasmic delirium of Grushenka and Dimitry Karamazov at Mokroe, just before the arrival of the law officers, when they are consummating their love in a euphemistically veiled on-stage act. The truth value of delirium is in its effect- which is the production of thought. Although the Devil is real in the sense that he claims he is, IK wants to reduce this 'real' to a condition of his own 'inflamed' (that is, presumably 'sick') imagination. What IK does not want to do is to go a step beyond this- and to see that to pronounce the Devil a 'reality of the imagination' is to posit the ultimaterealityofthesubjectofknowledge-whichisvirtuality,orthefourth dimension (of space). The truth, to which IK cannot reconcile himself, is the fact of the Devil's presence/absence. This is IK's blind spot, for he, too, represents, in the larger economy of the novel's structure, such an 'absent' presence. Initially, IK seems to function as a 'guardian' of the father. For it is only through IK's capricious decision to go to 'Chermashnya' that the necessary 'gap' or 'lacuna' (absence) is created, in which the murder of the father can take place. IK's Devil,likewise, personifies the principle of the presence of an absence - the absence of the signified, to which his presence does not extend the courtesy of an obliging 'transparency'. Thus, 'the intelligible syntax of the signifier' leaves IK completely confused in his confrontation with the absence of the signified. This 'scientific' man, who wishes to 'stay with the facts' in order to retain his mastery ('all is allowed' being the formula of mastery, under whose banner IK is said to have influenced the 'servant' Smerdiakov to carry out the parricide)- this 'scientific man', who accepts finitude and desires death at 30, cannot accept the ultimate fact- the fact of absence as the ultimate (supporting) reality of the subject of knowledge. IK is 'provoked' by this absence and even throws a wet towel (and an inkwell) at it- that is, he is moved to action by this absence. But this action, while not forfeiting any of its reality for the subject of knowledge Ivan - is virtual action. It has no other support than that of absence and delirium.
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Thus, although IK is aware that he has been hallucinating - but only retrospectively aware, and although he claims to be' sick', trying to 'void' his hallucinatory action in retrospect, the spectre of his hallucination does not go away. His 'act' (of throwing the towel) is real enough for him (and for the participating, gazing, peeping reader), even if it is not corroborated subsequently by the omniscient narrator. This means that the hallucinatory act obliges IK to descend onto the level of reality of his 'sickness', there to produce a gestural sign (which becomes synonymous with an act), which is at the same time, both objectively (from an observer's point of view) and subjectively (from the observed/ observing subject's point of view), a symptom of his condition. The symptom, as Lacan has pointed out, is a gap, synonymous with the multiple dot sign. LikeJosephKosuth's 'man',IK thus becomes a 'punctuation mark': instead of achieving transparency, the Self is reduced to a grammatical category. As soon as he is provoked to significant or signifying'action' vis- -vis this absence, IK is unwittingly drawn into the orbit of the signifying chain, or 'the web of the signifier'. Without acknowledging it, he (obligingly for the Devil) proves the pre-existence of a language which does 'not owe its truth to speech but to the gaze alone'.1 8 For it is the Devil's gaze- the Devil 'looking at IK', which provokes IK into action. Since action is coextensive with the sign (which is, in turn, coextensive with the symptom- with its attendant meaning of sumbolon as 'sign of recognition'), action, too, must be 'structured like a language'.19 However, IK manages to extricate himself from the effect of the gaze. For 'after' (during or as a function of) his encounter with the Devil, he lapses into madness. This state of 'madness', into which IK is said to have descended after Dimitry Karamazov's trial, is not madness to be taken at face value. Like Foucault's madness in civilisation, or Blanchot's Madness of the Day, it is a metaphor for a state of knowledge: the state of the subject of knowledge in the realm of the signifier. Paradoxically, while seeking out the 'facts', IK 'refuses' the signifier. He does this not only through demanding 'transparency' of the Devil. He does this also by 'refusing' 'God's world', because it, too, lacks the transparency of justice: the perfect balance between gift and debt. IKfindshimself,after his confrontation with the Devil,inastateofnonBeing: his absence from the plot, hidden away in the protective fold of the household of his mistress Katarina Ivanovna, symbolises this. IK's madness is simultaneously a state of excess - which constitutes the originating hyperbole of the subject of cogito. Like Foucault, Dostoevsky privileges madness as the ground against which cogito can indulge in its 'hyperbolic moment' of self-affirmation, by saying: 'Whether I am mad or not, cogito, sum'. 20 This hyperbole of reason, of cogito, unearthed by Foucault in his reading of Descartes, amounts to, according to Derrida, an 'unprecedented excess'- 'an excess in the direction of the non-determined, Nothingness or Infinity, an excess which overflows the totality of that which can be thought. .. ' 21 IK's madness is this instituting moment of cogito - the gap of nonmeaning, the principle of negativity (represented by IK's Devil), against which meaning or discourse is born into a 'historical' (that is, sequential, A
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linearised) existence. The novel should thus be read 'backwards' - its linearised plot being like a manifest dream, which runs from the past towards the present. The effect of the hyperbole of cogito, captured in this excess of negativity, which is coeval with madness, is transcendence. But not transcendence in the Classical sense, of the merging with a transcendental signified. This transcendence is an overcoming of a determining totality- the totality of signification, of discourse, of reason- cogito- and of certainty. The subject of knowledge, who transcends knowledge through the hyperbole of madness, is drawn into the infinite,- the infinite of finitude is how one might put it. For it is the infinite of'an undetermined totality'. This is how Derrida puts the same thought, interpreting Foucault: 'Even if I do not in fact grasp the totality, if I neither understand nor embrace it, I still formulate the project of doing so, and this project is meaningful in such a way that it can be defined only in relation to a precomprehension of the infinite and undetermined totality'. 22 The precomprehension of this infinite totality is denied IK- but not the reader. The 'state of knowledge' reached by the reader through IK's madness is that man's 'madness' consists of the 'active edge that splits [my] desire between a refusal of the signifier and a lack of being'. 23 This 'active edge', which splits the subject of knowledge, is Foucault's limit. It seems that the task of culture- according to both Dostoevsky's novel and Foucault's archaeology- is to maintain a balancing act on this limit point- the sort of act, represented by the bikini-clad, grotesque female body (a self-portrait of the artist), dancing on a tight-rope over the formally-attired crowd of bureaucratic citizens in a public space, in Tatyana Nazarenko's Conceptualist painting. The same balancing act is performed by Dostoevsky's extremely complex novel, which to this day awaits its supplementation through a fuller exegesis than it has so far had in Russian scholarship.
1 Foucault's analytic of the gaze, which is synonymous with the finitude of language and the positivity ofthe signifier, is to be found in his analysis of Velazquez's Las Meninas in the 'Analytic of Finitude' chapter of The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. Translated from the French. Routledge, London, 1992, pp.312-318. 2 Ibid, p.319. 3 Ibid, p.313. 4 Ibid. 5 Foucault,'A Preface to Transgression', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, D.B. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, (eds), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, p.314. 6 Jacques Derrida, 'Cogito and the History of Madness', in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 7 F. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30-ti tomakh. Tom XIV. Leningrad, 'Nauka', 1976, p.221. 8 Ibid, p.221. 9 Ibid, p.222 [my translation].
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10 Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy ofWriting. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, pp.45-6. 11 Ibid, p.46. 12 Ibid. 13 Compare M. I. Gorchakov, 'Nauchnaya postanovka tserkovnogo prava' ['A Scientific Approach to Church Law'], in: Sbornik gosudarstvennikh znanii, pod redaktsiei V. P. Bezobrazova. St Petersburg, 1875, pp.223-70. On close reading of the Gorchakov article, I have established that IK does not take up the real issues treated in it. Hence Dostoevsky uses a contemporary polemic as metaphor in which to couch a much broader cultural and epistemological question which preoccupies him and his fictional character. 14 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology ofMedical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock Publications, 1973 (first published in Paris, 1963), p.38. 15 Compare the analysis of melodrama in the light of the model of 'absorption' by Jean Copjec in 'The Cogito, the unconscious and the invention of crying', New Formations, No 23 Summer (1994):1-12. 16 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p.91. 17 Ibid, p.91. 18 Michel Foucault, quoted in Simon During, Foucault and Literature, p.47. 19 Simon During, Foucault and Literature, p.47. 20 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, p.57. 21 Ibid, p.57. 22 Ibid, p.56. 23 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: a selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1980, p.166.
Foucault and New Historicism in Literary Studies
CCaire Cofe6root This paper seeks to examine an apparent affinity between two methodologies: Foucault's 'ethics of the self' and Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicism. The similarity has been noted before and both practices have been attributed with causing or inspiring the other. Greenblatt cites Foucault as an influence in Learning to Curse while Foucault mentions Greenblatt approvinglyin The History ofSexuality, Volume 2 (Foucault 1985:11 ). Greenblatt's idea of self-fashioning, in which selves are nothing other than their modes of performance in a socio-cultural network, is in many ways easily linked to Foucault's description of sexual ethics as a practice in which selves produce those values and limits which shape their lives and bodies. Beginning from this ostensible similarity, this paper sets out to demonstrate a profound and radical difference. By recalling Foucault's critique of historicism in The Order of Things, I hope to indicate clearly some of the ways in which New Historicism has failed to take up a thoroughgoing critique of traditional historiography. Insofar as there are any generally agreed upon readings of Foucault's work, it is usually accepted that after Madness and Civilization Foucault became critical of, and rejected, a certain hypostatisation of madness as a pre-discursive, silent, timeless and pure 'Other'. The acceptance of madness as an object in itself is taken to be a residue of a rather naive phenomenology. With The Archaeology of Knowledge, it is argued, Foucault finds himself more appropriately in the realm of discourse. Here, exteriority and 'empiricities' are the effects, not the silent grounds, of discourse. In this paper, I want to argue that this shift from writing the 'history of a silence' to a description of discourse is more than just the casting off of an inappropriate ontology; it enables Foucault's later critique of historicism, phenomenology and the modern episteme within which they are located. Insofar as Madness and Civilization concerned the history of an 'Other' it partook to a certain extent in that project of ethnography and historicism which Foucault himself criticised in The Order ofThings. Like psychoanalysis and ethnography, historicism forms part of the final moment of an 'anthropologism' which seeks to study 'man' as a finite object at the same time as it brings to light the general conditions or grounds from which man emerges in all his diversity. Such human sciences locate man 'within' certain totalities (cultural or historical) as a finite production; but in their acts of interpretation practices such as historicism and ethnography presuppose both their object's finitude (cultural/historical location) and a transcendentalground(thepossibilityofovercomingthatfinitudeinanactofhistorical/ cultural interpretation). That is, all the differences observed between various cultural or historical totalities are made possible by referring to a
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transcendental condition: 'man' is, in his very essence'cultural' or historical. Historicity itself becomes the transcendental ground or an absolute value. According to Foucault, it is in this sense that historicism does not, and cannot, perceive its limits. Historicism both enables and becomes the object of a transcendental enquiry. Both positivism and transcendental critique, then, form the twin sides of this 'anthropologism'. 'Man' becomes a finite object of study; at the same time, he is placed in a medium, such as history, in which he can turn back upon himself, know himself and overcome his finitude. This'anthropologism' forms whatFoucaultrefers to as the' empiricotranscendental doublet'. Man becomes the object of a certain empiricism as a finite and positive object of knowledge; but he is also the subject that undertakes this very task of knowledge. Historicity, itself, becomes the very essence of 'man'. The idea of the boundedness of historical totalities, the isolated structure and determination of any historical moment, is a consequence of the empirical concept of 'man' as an object of knowledge, as a being determined by structure. But the act of this knowing, the idea of historicity itself, produces a transcendental dimension which itself cannot be reduced to historical enquiry. Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt's first major (and highly acclaimed) work is heavily indebted to the Foucault of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. In this study of literature from More to Shakespeare Greenblatt charts a genealogy of the modern self and argues that the idea of a private and interior subject is an effect of new modes of surveillance and new performances of power which emerge in the Renaissance. This historical shift is exemplified, for Greenblatt, in the career of Thomas More who is divided between, on the one hand, a yearning for a thoroughly communitarian, socially-defined self, and on the other, a private subjectivity which is set against social performance. The torture of heretics, according to Greenblatt, in its ritual of surveillance, confession, examination and questioning produced the sense of interiority which characterised the Renaissance- an era which was both aware of the status of selves as products of performance and profoundly anxious that the self was nothing other than performance (Greenblatt 1980:102). This new sense of interiority was only meaningful when asserted against public performance; but such a private self was also an effect of, and not a creator of, its corporeal and social acts. According to Greenblatt: 'There is a powerful ideology of inwardness but few sustained expressions of inwardness that may stand apart from the hated institutional structure' (Greenblatt 1980:85). If Greenblatt follows Discipline and Punish in arguing that the self is constituted through modes of surveillance, he appears as an even more dutiful Foucauldian when he discusses Spenser's representations of sexuality. The Bower of Bliss produces a threat which must at once be contained; the discourse of sexual excess produces the same discourse of renunciation. The domain of 'civility' is constituted by a power which marks a division between the sexual and the civilised: The Bower of Bliss must be destroyed not because its gratifications are unreal but because they threaten 'civility' - civilisation - which for Spenser is achieved only through renunciation and the constant exercise of power. If
j'oucau{t and ~w Jiistoricism in Literary Studies
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this power inevitably entails loss, it is also richly, essentially creative; power is the guarantor of value, the shaper of all knowledge, the pledge of human redemption (Greenblatt 1980:73).
So much, as I have suggested, seems like orthodox Foucault until we note a shift of tone in the final phrase of the above quotation. Here, Greenblatt is not speaking about power; he is articulating Spenser's vision of power. This is made more explicit in a following sentence when he aligns Spenser with Freud 'in the great Western celebration of power' (Greenblatt 1980:174). What happens here is not that we have an examination of the self as an effect of power (as in Foucault), rather, power is an ideology, an idea or representation through which individuals (like Spenser, Bacon, Freud, Shakespeare and Marlowe) construct themselves. One could argue that Greenblatt sees Renaissance authors as particularly self-aware, such that literary texts are not effects of the workings of power but themselves manifest a Nietzschean/ Foucauldian awareness of the operations of power. But there is also a sense in which power, on Greenblatt's reading, is nothing other than a representation, or a fact of ideology. If it is a display of power which produces an inner self, a seeming distance between the subject and its performance, then it is also the case that power is nothing other than a performance. Commenting this time upon Shakespeare, Greenblatt argues that the 'theater is widely perceived in the period as the concrete manifestation of the histrionic quality of life, and, more specifically, of power ... ' (Greenblatt 1980:253). That is, power is part of the perception of the period. It is a representation, an ideology; and it is insofar as power is a representation that it is able to act in the formation of subjects. Greenblatt, who both distances himself critically from this period, at the same time as he sees his history as a history of the present, posits performance and representation- and not power- as the explanation andexplanandum of Renaissance self-fashioning, and hence of modernity. The literary mode does have a privileged specificity- not because in its awareness of power it reveals the true workings of modern life- but because literature foregrounds representation. Only in literature is that dependence of the immediate inner voice on text and discourse made explicit. A shift occurs in the historical movement towards modernity whereby the dominant form of representation alters: from the self as constituted through public performance, the modern subject is dependent upon the text; the book replaces the communal body (Greenblatt 1980:159). In this shift the self is represented in a different mode and power is nothing other than the forcefulness of representations: 'one of the highest achievements of power is to impose fictions upon the world and one of its supreme pleasures is to enforce the acceptance of fictions that are known to be fictions' (Greenblatt 1980:141). The point in articulating this difference between Foucault and Greenblatt is not in order to say that Greenblatt has misread or remained unfaithful to Foucault. It is, rather, to point out that if, for Greenblatt, power is a mode of representation and performance then the ostensible similarities between new Historicism and Foucault's work conceal far greater differences. These differences could be summarised by remarking that the idea of representation in Greenblatt's work sustains the sense of human intentionality- an idea
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directly challenged by the positivity of Foucault's notion of power. This difference can further be illuminated by examining one of the other influences on New Historicism. Greenblatt's work is also highly indebted to Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) - a debt which becomes more apparent in his later work where he focuses more specifically on the idea of culture. Greenblatt's emphasis upon performance is also understandable given Geertz's rejection of 'culture' as a system of hidden rules or structures. On the contrary, for Geertz a culture is nothing other than a certain way of performing and practising. Rules are not mental events or unconscious patterns, but wellworn strategies. To understand a culture one engages in what Greenblatt approvingly quotes from Geertz as 'thick description'. Any event is, then, referred to socially contiguous practices and expectations in order for it to be interpreted. And interpretation is required because an action is meaningful; it is a 'symbolic action' because it forms part of a meaningful whole, and that meaningful whole is the context in which such actions make sense. According to Geertz, 'The aim is to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specifics' (Geertz 1973:28). Greenblatt inherits Geertz's aim for 'broad assertions' insofar as his readings serve to describe historical periods as broad as capitalism and the Renaissance. Furthermore, the examination of the modern self which in Renaissance Self-Fashioning seems so Foucauldian is also combined with Geertz's idea that selves are 'cultural artefacts'. Here, too, power is not that which produces the self, so much as a representation the self uses to perform as an individual. In the conclusion to Renaissance Self-Fashioning we can see that the idea of a distance between an interior self and its public performanceisnotentirelydoneawaywithbyGreenblatt;ratherthetwoare seen as inextricably intertwined: 'but as my work progressed, I perceived that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions- family, religion, state -were inseparably intertwined ... ' (Greenblatt 1980:256). Greenblatt's self, like Geertz's concept of man, is produced through culture. There is no 'man' other than its highly specific and particular formation in cultures (or, for Greenblatt, historical periods). The Renaissance is typified by an acute sense of the self as performance and therefore posits a performing self behind the social self. Greenblatt, on the other hand, demonstrates that the self is nothing other than performance. What he retains is the self as cultural artefact in Geertz's sense. Consequently, it is to the examination of cultural wholes and not individual intentions, thoughts or genius that Greenblatt's literary criticism is directed. And it is because of this that Greenblatt's examination of cultures is set within a general theory of representation and intentionality. The importance of representation is suggested in Renaissance Self-Fashioning but is made far more explicit in Greenblatt's later work. In Marvellous Possessions the European sense of history is explained as a particular from of representational technology (writing); colonialism is nothing other than 'an intensive deployment of representations' and cul-
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ture, in general, is described as a way of dealing with representations. Buying into the traditional post-Maussian anthropological idea that capitalism is characterised by an absence of symbolic exchange, Greenblatt argues that the encounter with the New World was characterised by an imposition of a single economy of representations. The native Americans themselves became tokens in this economy and were refused any' authentic reciprocity in the exchange of representations' (Greenblatt 1993:121). Whereas nonEuropean and pre-capitalist cultures engage in symbolic exchange - the circulation of meaningful objects to create social bonds- the conquistadors blocked exchange and imposed their own economy of representations, a mode of representation which did not acknowledge boundaries (Greenblatt 1993:121). The significance of the term representation here is crucial: it enables an anthropology. Representation is the mode of cultural formation; it posits a distance between something like a culture and the way it forms or fashions itself. A distance is opened up between an idea of culture in general, and the finite and particular examples of culture. Such differences can be surmounted through an interpretation which is enabled by a theory of 'man' as a representational animal. It is not surprising that Foucault in The Order of Things sees the idea of representation, anthropologism and historicism as part of the same modern episteme. What is denied is positivity - the event which cannot be recuperated in any general theory of culture or historicity. Insofar as representation explains the movement of culture in general, it reproduces a transcendental dimension or ground against which any particular manifestation can be explained. Greenblatt's work is an anthropologism insofar as it sees 'man' as a cultural artefact- a self-constituting particularity produced in finite totalities; at the same time his work sits happily in a general theory of finitude. In its explanation of 'man' and 'culture' it produces that 'fold' which resists positivity. Finite man, through the concept of ethnography or historicism turns back upon himself, takes himself as an object and explains his differences - in doing so these differences are recuperated into an interpretive whole. Foucault, on the other hand, situates his own methodology of history as itself historically determined. It cannot, therefore, provide a general ground; there can only be particular, invested and interested, or positive, descriptions. In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume I, power is not a representation. To see it as such is to already situate it within the life of the subject. Power provides the way of thinking through a philosophy of multiplicity. There is not a self or consciousness which represents an exterior world but a single ground of multiplicities - or a 'new positivism' in Deleuze's sense (Deleuze 1988:13). To think power in this way is to attempt to move away from representation and towards empirical positivity. In contradistinction to Foucault's position, the idea of representation posits a world, on the one hand, and on the other culture, meaning or structure. For Greenblatt, the relation between the world or history and representation is dialectical - involving a continual renegotiation and adjustment. But the general concept of representation remains intact and provides a way of interpreting other cultures and periods; it provides an
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idea of culture or history in general and therefore opens the space for interpretation. Foucault's anti-interpretive stance, on the other hand, suggests that statements, words and actions are coterminous. There is nothing behind the word or action; it is not the sign for something else. There is not a general anterior ground- such as history, culture, consciousness- against which particularity is articulated. There is nothing other than particularity or positivity. This too, of course, is a positive statement; butonewhichresists recuperation into a general or transcendental ground. Foucault's antihistoricist project sets itself against questions of 'history in general'. It does so by arguing for a positivity in which the question of truth in general will remain, essentially, unanswerable.
Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles (1988). Foucault, trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. __ _, (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. AM. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. __ _, (1985). The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. __ _, (1988). Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Part Two Australian History: Art, Science and Government
History and the Painted Landscape in Mid-Nineteenth Century South Australia
!RJtsse{{Staiff ...natural history has as a condition of its possibility the common affinity of things and language with representation; but it exists as a task only in so far as things and language happen to be separate. It must therefore reduce this distance between them so as to bring language as close as possible to the observing gaze, and the things observed as close as possible to words. Natural history is nothing more than the nomination of the visible. 1
The distinctions between whatever it is we consider to be the constituency of 'science' and whatever it is we consider to be germane to painting or drawing, produce epistemological categories that can be found operating, in various forms, in a number of specific European cultural contexts. Within particular historical spaces, they are often described relationally; indeed, such distinctions are rarely regarded as absolute, but in order to narrate the relationship between 'art' and 'science', the terms remain ontological entities even when, perhaps especially when, transgression is the subject of the historical description. 2 Bernard Smith's magisterial study of the relationship between scientific investigation and drawing/painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries- his European Vision and the South Pacific - describes an interaction which seems palpable in its obviousness and yet, in hindsight, this relationship is problematic because the connections between image making and 'science' are built on, what may be, an unsustainable series of binarisms. Smith was not unaware that central aspects of his thesis should be the subject of ongoing critical attention. Indeed in the preface to the second edition of European Vision and the South Pacific, published in 1985, he issued a challenge in the form of a regret that the two major themes explored in his work, had not received 'serious discussion'. 3 The two themes Smith identified in his challenge are described in this way. The first, expressed in Kuhnian terminology, suggested that, ...the Pacific region provided a challenging new field of experience for Europeans, one which placed unprecedented pressure upon the Biblical creation theory and provided, simultaneously, a wealth of new evidence out of which was fashioned eventually the first scientifically credible theory of evolution. 4
The second theme was written upon the belief that, The European control of the world required a landscape practice that could first survey and describe, then evoke in new settlers an emotional engagement with the land they had alienated from its Aboriginal occupants ... the conceptual underpinnings of the landscape throughout... (were) the dominating categories of the descriptive sciences (botany, zoology, geology, geography, meteorology, anthropology, etc.) by means of which landscapes
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and their inhabitants were effectively described and brought under control. Only then were the conventional categories of European landscape used to endow the new in its typicality with a familiar European gloss.s
Michel Foucault's early work The Order of Things, provides a framework for the interrogation of both of these propositions and the framework for a description of colonial visual culture that extends and deepens Smith's narrative rather than subverting it. What I would want to describe differently are the mechanisms of imaging involved in a number of site specific activities like cartography, natural history, ethnography, literature and landscape painting and, in turn, their relationship to colonial possession/ dispossession of the land. I would want to reimagine, and thus recast, the relationship between these categories by using epistemological approaches to the question of representation rather than the cognitive theories of perception6 drawn upon by Bernard Smith. The intractable problem at the heart of cognitive theories of perception is the notion of the 'essential copy' which, in turn, enables Smith to maintain throughout his work, a host of apparently stable binarisms. The narrative of European Vision and the South Pacific invariably depends on a series of distinctions, admittedly often heavily qualified; distinctions like topographical versus picturesque modes of landscape painting, science versus art, faithful or accurate versus distorted or erroneous visual descriptions and so on, all of which can mask certain continuities between what seem like quite unassailable differences within a colonial visual culture. Following the path opened up by Foucault, I would suggest that these oppositional positions are merely 'surface disagreements' because they all 'rest on the same epistemological base'.7 Indeed, these binarisms can be regarded as strands within the same scopic regime.s In the colonial scopic regime, operating at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the relationship between representation and the empirical domains of investigation was unproblematic precisely because the signs were pure representation with no content of their own. In Foucauldian terms, the world seen was the world represented. The discursive territories explored by Bernard Smith can thus be regarded as occupying a particular historical space defined, amongst other things, by its display of characteristics associated with Foucault's classical episteme. In the specific case of the practice of natural history and landscape painting in colonial South Australia, the subject of this paper, the mid-nineteenth century was not, perhaps surprisingly, the site of an emergent modernity in the Foucauldian sense. Here was a pocket of cultural enterprise seemingly unaffected by a post-Kantian and post-Cuvier discursive climate.9 Let me begin with the contention that surfaces are made visible by culturally inscribed processes. Culturally specific actions of visuality make certain spatia-phenomenal elements highly visible, but render, at the same time, other spatia-phenomenal elements invisible to the spectator's gaze. In so doing, the visual processes and their attendant visualities, proclaim the way surfaces are to be regarded; they open up rhetorical spaces and thus points of view. 1o Consequently one can postulate that spatia-phenomenal entities are simultaneously re-invented and re-inscribed by the imperial gaze of the coloniser. Exactly how this visual process operated in a colonial
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context can be partially illustrated by examining just one visual sub-culture: the visualisations central to the natural history project as it was conducted in the province of South Australia after European settlement in 1836. The implications for the writing of colonial art history can be found in the relationship I want to suggest between the visualities of natural history and the visual conceptualisation of the panoramic landscape in a work published by the artist and naturalist George French Angas. The minutes of the Adelaide Philosophical Society11 record that on May 29, 185512 the vice president, Charles Algernon Wilson13 an entomologist, read a paper entitled The Microscope applied to Art, Manufacturing and Commerce.14 Those gathered at the City Council Chambers learnt that the microscope ...has opened to us a new and in exhaustible field of wonder and research; displaying to our astonished gaze another world of objects, of exquisite formation and surpassing beauty; so minute that without the powerful aid of optical science, we must for ever have remained unconscious of their existence.ls
The appearance of a spate of writings about mechanical aids of observation in the nineteenth century,16 was not, however, a response to the development of technically superior instrumentation nor was it due to the passing of the idea that microscopy was theologically suspect, 17 but instead, corresponded with what has usefully been called a 'new discursive order'. Words, and the taxonomies within which they dwelt, was a critical part of the process by which an object was visualised.1s The 'object' was not a randomly chosen entity but an object given visibility by the simultaneous actions of an applied optical technology and the infixion of language onto that which was being viewed at the end of a microscope, telescope or magnifying glass.19 Visualisation was therefore anything but a simple and uni-directional cause and effect transformation of the observable into word and image. Rather, the demands of site specific natural history, itself a discourse about the observable world,2° enabled mechanical observation to proceed as an interrogation of that which was not normally seen unaided by the human eye. The intervention of technology, however, made the objects of study quite a different phenomenon to the objects casually seen with the naked eye. It was language that filled the gap between the two types of looking, by immediately differentiating between the observing states; that with and that without an instrument of observation.21 Words then, and not the microscope or magnifying glass, visualised the object by bringing into being a world of objects previously hidden and yet not so hidden as to be unutterable things: the taxonomies by which observations would ultimately be known, guaranteed their visibility. Beyond the taxonomies, objects remained invisible and no marmer of optical device and its use could alter this.22 Wilson's lecture on microscopy registered several ambivalent sentiments within his praise for the 'wonders' of the optical device and its potential to serve as 'a valuable adjunct of science ... art, manufactures and commerce'. 23 Wilson spoke of the microscope as a display of 'another world of objects' which for the naturalist was the conjuring up of the minute ' ... as with the
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wand of a magician' so that the previously invisible, entered the dominion of the human gaze: ' ... multitudes of minute vegetable and animal races inhabiting the earth, the air, and the water, even to the depths of the ocean... and which, have never yielded up to any power that man is possessed of the long preserved secret of their hidden existence'. 24 Magic, invisibility and 'other worlds' were pitted against science's 'high degree of perfection'25 and therefore dispelled all three; the analogous had given way to the taxonomic under the aegis of the Enlightenment, and in so doing, had retrieved the unknown and brought it within a field of vision. 26 Taxonomy was thus a fundamental condition for the possibility of seeing the natural world27 and attempting to unite into a seamless visibility all phenomena observed with the unaided eye, with all those made apparent by optical technology.2s The articulation of the visible was the immediate concern of Wilson when he began his regular natural history column in The South Australian Register on 7 November, 1840. In his first article Wilson established that it was the classification that brought visibility and that it was the role of the naturalist to reveal that which otherwise might remain hidden. He wrote of the 'indefatigable exertions which have lately been made to remove the dark curtain which has hitherto wrapped in doubt the nature of the immense extent of the country that lies between shore and shore' and that such exertions are 'fast disclosing... (the land's) hidden stores to the naturalists of the expecting world'.29 Thus begins Wilson's description of the insect life of South Australia, the beetle being his first object of study. 'I have discovered during upwards of two years' residence in the colony, more than one hundred and fifty species of beetles, almost all strangers to Britain; and I'm convinced that there are several new genera entirely unknown to naturalists ... '. 30 Taxonomies not only made visibility possible they did so by bringing the visible into the domain of language, however this ever closer proximity of things and their representation, only worked because the descriptions written under the aegis of the taxonomy were restricted to the structures which enabled the same observation to be made over and over again. It was structure, or in this case the forms that constituted botanical description, which brought together in a simultaneous action, the visible and 'the nomination of the visible'. 31 Visual representation in natural history carmot, therefore, be divorced from the process of naming the parts of a plant or animal and describing its measurements, all under the regime of the taxonomy. Drawings- the lines, the surfaces, the forms and the reliefs of the objects brought into a state of visibility- followed the dictates of the taxonomic process and in doing so banished all obscurity. 32 The fit between object, class, structure, part, name and image was perfect enough to enable immediate recognition amongst those familiar with the study of natural history; the drawing of a plant or animal was intelligible precisely because it represented, not an unmediated object gazed upon with the eye of utter dis-interest, but one already defined taxonomically and thus already embedded in the discourses of natural history. 33
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In the journals, notebooks and publications of those practising natural history in or near Adelaide in the 1840's, the isolation of the natural history object from its surroundings was indicative of the crucial role of plotting visual differences. The search for difference underpinned the ocular application of the taxonomy, but the application itself was rendered irrelevant in the drawings, as was the material context of the object. This was expressed, through the kind of rhetoric that often surrounded mid-nineteenth century 'scientific' endeavour, for example, in a diary entry pertaining to 'eyes' and 'seeing' written by William Cawthorne, a young conchologist cum school master who arrived in Adelaide in 1842. He wrote, Seeing. What delightful pictures can our eyes not present to us, what exquisite tints it takes in. How much, how very much they add ... to our pleasure. Heaven and Earth in one sweep, in one slight glance, we see. Brings the most distant objects to our view. Shows us country miles away. Represents trees, the most appealing prospects. Makes us enjoy the sun, the moon, the stars and the earth with all its variety.34
Variety was the key. Indeed 'variety in nature' was a significant overarching description for natural history's realm. Equally, the idea of there being 'infinite variety in God's universe' provoked an aesthetic cum spiritual response; there was frequently the suggestion that one should stand and marvel at the infinite possibilities of nature. This particular intersection between religion and natural history made them, in this instance, powerful and interchangeable partners: infinite variety was, to the wonders of Creation, what difference was, to the construction of knowledges about the physical world.35 The partnership, it would appear, was central to the production of Fanny De Mole's Wild Flowers of South Australia published in 1861.36 The work consisted of twenty gilt edged, hand-coloured, lithographic plates with accompanying pages of printed text, also gilt edged. In her preface, De Mole claimed the work had no botanical pretensions and was merely a book of Australian flowers, encountered daily, to familiarise friends in England. What she then wrote, made the partnership between the pictorial record of natural history and religion, explicitly one that pertained to the magnificence of variety. .. .though we miss some of those (flowers) dear to our childhood ... the Creator has liberally adorned the land of our adoption with others of equal beauty. In none of His works, perhaps, are His beneficent desires towards us more manifest; a variety of beauty, in the form and colouring of flowers, springing up on every side, simply and wholly for our delight. May not these pictures which show such new combinations of form and colour, serve, at least in those who see them for the first time, to stir afresh a feeling of love and gratitude to Him who manifests such overflowing love towards us?3 7
Although De Mole denied it was a work of botany, preferring to emphasise the aesthetic qualities of the flowers she had observed, the organisation of the work, verbally and pictorially, indicates an intimate link with the processes of natural history. Plate I, a full-page drawing of a South Australian example of a lilac, is accompanied on the opposite page, by a description which is arranged into two parts, the Linnaean classification followed by a
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general account. The classification is given under three headings, the natural order, the genus and the variety. The general description notes that there are seven varieties, or more, of Hardenbergia, and that the differences between them lies in the form of the leaf and the colours of the flower. In her lithographed drawing she included two different coloured flower types, white and lilac. De Mole wrote that they were in marked contrast with the English lilac, were a climbing plant seen over cottage verandahs, and could be kept as a hedge or garden shrub.38 Plate VIII is a depiction of Sturt's Pea. After citing the Linnaean classification, De Mole noted that it had been first observed by William Dampier in 1699, won a silver medal from the Horticultural Society in England, had been successfully raised in several parts of Europe, and its nomenclature was ascertained by Robert Brown. 39 The significance of botanical knowledge to the conception of the book is thus obvious, but not just at the taxonomic level. There is also a studied awareness of the literature of natural history born out by her references to difference being the basis of variety, to figures like Robert Brown and Ferdinand von Mueller, and to the activities of societies like the Horticultural Society. Elsewhere in these descriptions, she writes of the distribution of particular orders of plants, not just in South Australia, but throughout Australia and beyond. 40 The compositional devices De Mole utilised in her pictures, implicated her more deeply in the natural history project, and certainly this did not run counter to the aesthetic considerations that played such a prominent part in her work. The two were never really in a dialectical relationship. Such an understanding has arisen in those art historical studies where empiricism has been distilled out from the aesthetic, and treated as an essentially different visual phenomenon. Further, in such studies, the empirical is invariably subordinated to paintings conceptualised in aesthetic terms. 41 To insist on these distinctions in De Mole's work is to argue the unsustainable. All of De Mole's pictures work in concert with the taxonomic details of each flower's botanical classification, and so the significance of the twenty flowers selected, becomes the striking way the differences, between each classification, assert themselves visually. Lines, surfaces, reliefs, and colour serve to make visible that which has been nominated as visible. Thus the almost perfect fit between the verbal description and the visual description as they spatially dialogue across the double printed page. These are simultaneous verbal and visual events, and both are bound by the conventions of botanical representation,42 in its endless attempt, to bring language and object closer and closer together. The veracity of natural history demanded it. De Mole however, claimed a sensitivity to the idea of presenting her flowers as 'beauteous forms and colours' that paid homage to God's 'adornment of the land' by inducing feelings of love and gratitude to the Creator. Her careful attention to botanical detail, as dictated by the differences observed via the demands of the taxonomy, was equally the 'delight' in the 'variety of beauty'. The empirical and the aesthetic were inseparably fused, just as God and natural history were discursively hinged together. 43 This happy conjunction was particularly evident in those natural histories where pictures of individual species were incorporated into painted land-
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scape scenes thereby subsuming the botanic object into an aestheticised panoramic view. Even though the pictorial conventions used in a botanical drawing and those used in an perspectival landscape existed upon quite different sets of assumptions,44 the painted landscape was not a denial of the taxonomic, nor a binary privileging of the aesthetic, or inventive, over the empirical,45 rather, it can be considered as something else entirely. Natural history reconstructed and reinscribed the panoramic gaze incorporated into the painted landscape. What was largely invisible to the naked eye when viewing a panoramic scene, except in the most general way, became visible when seen through a glass; that is, when ocular technology was used to magnify the panoramic. At that moment, and aided by the existence of natural history as a verbal and visual discourse, the mass of discreet entities of flora and fauna, were made visible. Knowledge that the total, viewed panoramically, was made up of an almost infinite number of individual plants, animals, birds, insects and minerals, made the landscape visibly denser. Via optical devices and their associated taxonomies, natural history enabled the viewer to penetrate the panoramic landscape; in a sense, it was made more visible than with the naked eye. The visual processes of natural history thus gave the painted landscape visual depth. 46 Understanding that the magnified structures of individual botanical and mineral entities, in their infinite variety, made up the phenomenon taken in by the eye, cast across the horizon, enabled an important discursive relationship between the visual representations of natural history and the painted representation of the landscape. At the ideological level, this exposed a powerful synthesis of the empirical with the totalising desires of an imperial gaze, ever intent on manufacturing capillaries of control. Such relationships however, had quite specific sites of occupancy and can be observed, for example, in George French Angas' South Australia Illustrated, published in ten parts over 1846 and 1847 and his two volumed work, Savage life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, published in London during 1847.47 In the preface of Savage Life and Scenes, Angas made it clear that the written descriptions of his 'wanderings' were conceived as the 'notes' accompanying the picture folios, South Australia Illustrated and New Zealand Illustrated. 48 He presented himself as the' disinterested observer' with a twin concern: an 'ardent admiration of the grandeur and loveliness of (Antipodean) Nature in her wildest aspect' 49 and an aim to 'describe faithfully impressions of savage life and scenes'. 5° These two interests constitute the basis of seemingly separate but, intentionally integrated, visualities that, in turn, made visual depth an essential part of the knowledges generated by Angas' journeyings. 51 It is instructive to read an example of this constant interplay between an' admiration' for' grandeur and loveliness' and 'faithful' descriptions of 'life and scenes' in his writing. The following extract from Savage Life and Scenes describes a trip from Adelaide to the Mt Lofty Ranges, the hills that form a backdrop to the city. The description incorporates a viewing process that alternates between the panoramic (and his use of the map as a potent analogy is a significant indicator of the type of gaze he is intent on constructing) and the precisely located taxonomic visualisation of specific species of flora and fauna. It is the writing that synthesises the two
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visualisations into a continuum of seeing/verbalising. As Angas himself noted, his claim for public attention rested on being a 'faithful describer of what struck the mind of the artist seeking to delineate the characteristic features of the countries and people'.52 The road becomes very steep as it ascends the Mount Loft range, and on gaining the heights, a stupendous and magnificent scene presents itself. Looking back, the plains we had recently left were stretched out far beneath us, extending to the shores of St. Vincent's Gulf; the hazy blue of its calm bosom being discernible to its whole extent, and the faint outline of the opposite coast of Yorke's peninsula bounding the horizon. From this point the scenery on all sides is enchanting; and whoever the settler may be who has perched his habitation amidst these mountains, he has certainly shown his taste in selecting one of nature's loveliest positions, commanding some ofthe finest views in the colony... We now pursued our path through the leafy shades ofthe 'string-bark' forests that clothe these mountainous ironstone ranges. They consist of tall primeval trees of a kind of eucalyptus ... Amongst the low flowering shrubs, the bulrushlike heads of the grass-tree (xantharea) impart a singular character to these Australian forests ...The singing of the cicada- an insect belonging to the order Homoptera- was loud and incessant throughout the whole forest, interrupted by the occasional notes of the musical magpie, whose shrill pipings are known to every Australian settler ... On approaching Echunga springs, the land becomes undulating, and is less densely wooded. The she-oak (casuarina ), the blackwood (acacia), and the vivid green of the exocarpus- the native cherry of the colonists - with the elegant Banksia, covered with tall cones, form a change in the character of the foliage. The 'native cherry' somewhat resembles our 'arbor vitae', and the fruit, from which it has obtained its name, is a small red berry, with the stone or kernel outside attached to the end of the fruit. 53
What is written in Savage Life and Scenes, is presented pictorially in South Australia Illustrated, a large folio work, dedicated to Queen Adelaide, published in London and consisting of sixty hand-coloured lithographic plates, each plate having an accompanying text written by the artist. In the entomological studies, Plate XXXVII for example, all the familiar elements of taxonomic visuality are present. The lithographed image of each species, arranged in a manner that resembles the display of specimens in a collector's drawer or in a cabinet of curiosities,54 is numbered. The numbers pertain to the accompanying lists of the botanical names, that is, the classification of each species. The emphasis is thus on visually verifiable differences between each of the selected butterflies, the drawings carefully arranged for an overall compositional effect, with the individual adult butterflies carefully organised by size, around an image of a section of a small branch of a tree, bearing a Iepidoptera in a caterpillar stage and two types of attached cocoons. The eye is inexorably drawn to the patterns and colours which mark taxonomic difference and encourage the viewer to engage with the infinite variations, in not only the intricate patterns and the differenttonalities of the wings, but also in the different sizes, shapes and configurations of each pair of wings. Effortlessly, the viewer is urged to visually consider the minute world of an optically aided 'reality', where aesthetic delight happily coexisted with the quest for botanical precision.
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In Plate II, the visual event has a different emphasis, and the botanical is positioned within a panoramic view. The title of the plate indicates the two simultaneous visual occasions: Grass Trees at Yankallillah with the Red Kangaroo (Macropus Laniger). What is significant here is the pressing into the panoramic, of what is considered botanically efficacious. Visually, there are doubts about the identity of Angas' background landscape, given its highly generalised appearance and the lack of any visual markers that cartographically pin it down. Angas however, not only names the place- Yankallillah - but in the accompanying text gave a precise location: 'not far from the picturesque residence ofMr Kemmis'. This geographic fixing was important to the overall effect of the visual counterpoint: the taxonomic description against and within the landscape description. As if to stress this, the text that adjoins the lithograph, concentrated on botanical and zoological detail. 55 Angas writes that, This scene represents the largest variety of the Xantharea, which is to be met with in South Australia; there are from ten to fifteen species already known, all of which are designated by the Colonists as 'grass trees'. This magnificent species occurs most frequently in the glens and gullies of the mountains about Rapid Bay and Cape Jervis; the group figured are at Yankallillah ... 56
Angas' description of the kangaroo, however, is wholly derivative and indicates the degree to which his concern for the empirically impeccable is not at odds with his elaborate knitting together of natural history sources. 57 Visual 'truth' is established not just by the 'direct' observations of the writer, or to be more precise, verifying the taxonomically nominated, but also by appealing to the' authoritative' literature of natural history where classifications were confirmed over and over again. Thus his classification of the great red kangaroo- Macropus laniger- is accompanied by a quotation from John Gould's study of the mammal. Gould, who has figured and described it in his beautiful work on the 'Macropodidae', thus writes: This noble species of Kangaroo is the largest and one of the most elegant of its race yet discovered; it is in fact the finest of the Australian Mammalia: the female is particularly attractive, from her graceful, slender, and elegant form, and from the snowy whiteness of her legs and under surface contrasted with the blue-grey tint of her sides and back. ..ss
The River Murray Above Moorundi is the title of Plate ill. The selection of the view quite clearly conforms to the dictates of the popularised version of the picturesque,59 manipulated within the perspectival schema of picture construction and suiting the demands of the panoramic so efficiently. In Savage Life and Scenes, Angas describes his excursion to the Murray, near Moorundi, in the following terms. The scenery is singular and picturesque: high cliffs of yellow fossiliferous sandstone form a basin or valley about two miles in breadth, through which the noble Murray winds in a series of magnificent reaches from side to side; at one spot the cliffs will descend abruptly to the water's edge. whilst at another the river flows on through verdant meadows, shaded by clusters of enormous gum-trees, the rich deep foliage of which casts a broad shadow on each bank of the stream. 60
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The verbal description conjures up the formulaic version of pictorial landscape scenes and emphasises the expanse of the distances between the viewer I reader and the horizon, and the dynamics of viewing where the eye moves from side to side and from the near distance to the far distance, imitating perfectly, the well known conventions of a perspectival system of representation. However the 'scenic' and the 'picturesque' do not stand isolated from other descriptions. Both the text in South Australia Illustrated and the reminiscence in Savage Life and Scenes include a veritable catalogue of natural history detail. Some of the flora can be directly observed in the picture, like the gum trees, but significantly a host of details are not visible. Both accounts mention the crested pigeon, Ocyphaps Lophotes, and' a vast variety of brilliant parrots and other birds ... enlivening the evergreens with their gay plumage';61 and both texts describe the 'fossiliferous cliffs' with their layers of gypsum, within which are embedded the glass-like transparent spiral shells of the genus turbo, and a number of other fossilised shells like pectens, echinae and corallines. 62 The text, next to the image, also refers to the Murray Cod, a 'delicious fish', swimming beneath the surface of the waters of the river. The reader of South Australia Illustrated is thus invited to imagine all these details within the scene being depicted; to appreciate that what is visible, includes a vast array of entities that are either invisible to the naked eye, or cannot be seen in the panoramic sweep of the eye across the terrain majestically spread out before the European observer/recorder. This enriched viewing of the panoramic, the result of the verbal and the visual coinciding, gives the landscape its visual density. The infinite variety in creation, taxonomically defined by a small army of natural historians collecting, recording and painting, becomes the foundation of the 'reality' presented to the eye of the European traveller/explorer, intent on assiduously knowing all commanded by his gaze. In April1844 Angas set out with Governor Grey on his expedition to the south east of the colony. 63 At Rivoli Bay, beyond the Coorong, Angas recorded the penguin colony they found there, drawings and descriptions of which, appeared in both South Australia Illustrated and Savage Life and Scenes. On a sandy reef in the bay, the expedition came across some sea-lions. One specimen was killed. Angas sketched it and then the mammal was measured before being skinned. The skin and the drawing were sent to 'be preserved for the national collection' at the British Museum. 64 On one level, these actions encapsulate what has been called the 'intellectual motions' of mid-nineteenth century natural history. These motions trace Angas' search for the legibility and commodification of nature and his harnessing together of knowledge and imperial power. Both these traces demonstrate a belief that the observer was separate from the exterior world being observed and that this was the key to the total mastery of this world of natural forms. However this imperial appropriation of the supposedly objective, never openly recognised, let alone acknowledged the perspectives of its own representation. 65 If natural history was only ever the 'nomination of the visible', then finally, it could not escape representation. 66 This was the destiny of the ocular technologies employed, but carefully elided, by the
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South Australian practitioners of natural history in their quest to know and have dominion over the 'natural' world they occupied.67 1 2
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Foucault 1973:132. I am thinking of two well known examples in art historical discourse: fifteenth century Florence and seventeenth century Netherlands. See Baxandall1988 and Alpers 1983. Smith 1989:viii. Ibid, p.viii. Ibid, pp.ix-x. As explicated within art theory by Gombrich and critiqued by Bryson. See Bryson, 1983: 1-66. Foucault 1973:144-5. I use the term in the same sense as that employed by Jay, 1988:3-23 esp. 3-4. Although the conceptual problematic of the 'nature of humanity', as a project of modernity (by virtue of its emphasis on the invisible organic structures that posited a transcendental sameness underlying all living things) was especially operative in the visual and verbal discourses constructing European notions of mid-nineteenth century Aboriginality. This would suggest that in the first half of the nineteenth century any transition from what Foucault called the classical episteme to what he regarded as the modem episteme was, as one would expect, quite uneven both geographically (within the West) and within particular discourses. Mid-nineteenth century Adelaide provides an example of discursive practices that constantly shift between two modes of representation, one a ground of knowledge, the other the vehicle of an empirical description of outward appearances. Cf. Foucault's description of representation within the classical episteme and that he terms 'modem'. Foucault 1973:217-343. Cf. Carter 1987:99-104. The Adelaide Philosophical Society was established on January 10, 1853. On October 25 of that year, at a special meeting, the 'laws' of the Society were agreed upon. It defined its object to be 'the discussion of all subjects connected with Science, Literature and Art'. Minutes ofthe Adelaide Philosophical Society: 20, Papers of the Adelaide Philosophical Society, SRG 10/1 /vol. 2. For background to the Society see Cooper 1970:1-38. Minutes of the Adelaide Philosophical Society: 47, Papers of the Adelaide Philosophical Society, SRG 10/1/vol. 2. See also the list of papers read before the Society 1853-1877, SRG 10/1/vol. 4. For biographical details and his entomological work see Wilson and Borrow 1973: 276-281, 316-317 and 346. Wilson had not himself written the paper but instead, delivered one which had been read before the Society of Arts in London on May 24, 1854 by S. W. Leonard. Leonard's work was subsequently printed in the Journal of the Society of Arts, and this, presumably, was Wilson's source. See Leonard 1854:460-469. Leonard's paper had a slightly different title to Wilson's- On the Microscope, as Applied to Art, Science, Manufacturing and Commerce. There is no indication as to whether or not Wilson adapted the London paper or whether he read it exactly as it was printed in the Journal ofthe Society ofArts. There had been a correspondence between the Adelaide Philosophical Society and the Society of Arts in London since April1854. See the Minutes of the Adelaide Philosophical Society: 35, Papers of the Adelaide Philosophical Society, SRG 10 /1/vol. 2. Leonard 1854:461. A typical and often quoted example, in the area of microscopy, is John Quekett's practical treatise on microscopes and the preparation of organic and non-
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organic specimens for an analysis of structure. This well known publication was lauded in Leonard's paper. Quekett 1852:67-148, 343-351 and 399-457. Leonard 1854:460. Also see Bradbury 1968:108-110. An important discussion about optical techniques in the nineteenth century, their place within the scopic regime and their relationship to the project of Modernity, is to be found in Crary 1990. Bradbury 1967:150-151 and Wilson 1988:85-108. Preziosi 1989:56. Cf Foucault's discussion of 'structure' as the enabling condition by which the visibility of an object seen through a microscope is transcribed into language. Foucault 1973:132-139. For an exposition of this idea in relation to other works by Foucault see Jay 1986:182-183. Foucault 1973:132-134. See also Rajchman 1988:101. Preziosi 1989:55-56. Foucault 1973:134-137 and Rajchman 1988:91-93. Roland Barthes makes a similar observation in his essay 'The World as Object'. Barthes 1964:108. Also see Elkins 1992:33-56. Leonard 1854:461. Ibid. Ibid. Elkins 1992:33-39. Or, as Foucault writes, 'the common affinity of things with language and representation.' Foucault 1973:132ff. The traces of an eighteenth century disquiet induced by an awareness of these two types of seeing and the culturally defined suspicion of the 'monsters' to be seen through the lens of a microscope are however still apparent in Leonard's I Wilson's lecture. The previously hidden is deemed 'inexhaustibly wonderful' and 'beautiful' over and over again. Such insistence seems necessary. See Elkins 1992:33-56 for a discussion of the circumstances which produced the shift from analogous to taxonomic comprehension of microscopy. The South Australian Register, 7 November, 1840. Ibid. Foucault 1973:134-5. Foucault 1973:133 and 137. The characteristics of the image described here are those suggested by Foucault but in an altogether different context. He is concerned with a visibility freed from the other senses. I have found these characteristics to be useful in defining the drawn image as it was utilised in nineteenth century natural history. And while it is tempting to collapse the distinctions between verbal and visual representations because of their shared epistemological conditions of possibility and because they are both representations of natural history's objects of study, the relationship between word and image is a good deal more complicated. Any assumed unity between the verbal and the pictorial tends to mask the paradox so eloquently summed up in Foucault's observation that ' ... it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say'. Foucault 1973:9. This idea is the subject of further discussion in his essay on Rene Magritte. Foucault 1983:1-63. Cawthorne Papers, A103, Literarium Diarium, Sun. 21 May, 1843. The link was explicit in a paper Charles Wilson read before the Adelaide Philosophical Society in 1856. The text of the lecture does not seem to have survived. See Wilson and Barrow 1973:276-278. An abstract of the paper is in the Fifth Report of the Adelaide Philosophical Society, 1858, Papers of the Adelaide
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A comprehensive list of Angas' published works (both books and natural history papers) can be found in Iredale 1959:363-367. Also published in parts in folio form (60 hand-coloured lithographic plates) in London, in 1847. Angas 1847 (a):vii. Ibid, pp.vii-viii. It is not however being suggested that Angas' 'objectivity' or his 'faithful descriptions' were anything other than an elaborate stitching together of various sources, botanical or otherwise. SA Illustrated is full of quotations from published writings (eg John Gould) and from the notes made by other writers, mostly unacknowledged (eg Matthew Moorhouse and William Cawthorne). In the final analysis, Angas' texts conform to the conventions of mid-nineteenth century travel writing with an eye towards his English readers. Angas 1847 (a):viii. Ibid, pp.42-5. For example, seethe photograph of a collector's chest ofc.1820 inMoyal1986:93. However what would now be called ecological accuracy - getting the species and its natural habitat to coincide- was not, it seems, part of the integration of natural history into the panoramic view. The Great Red Kangaroo was not an inhabitant of that part of South Australia, something Angas himself acknowledges. Angas 1847 (b): text accompanying Plate II. Often not acknowledged, according to Cawthorne in some quite vehement diary entries. Cawthorne Papers, A104, Literarium Diarium, Wed. 10 July, 1844; and A105, Literarium Diarium, Tues. 1 July, 1845. Tregenza discusses other examples of unacknowledged sources in SA Illustrated with regard to visual 'borrowings'. Tregenza, unaware of Cawthorne's comments, and the nature of Angas' text, views them as 'lapses'. Tregenza 1980:17-18. Angas 1847 (b): text accompanying Plate II. The term is problematic because of the variety of contexts within which it has been used. Here I refer to those formal Claudian qualities which emerged in the picturesque construction of the landscape and by the middle of the nineteenth century had become a formula for the representation of the landscape: darker foreground, light luminous background, framing devices that focus the eye towards the centre of the picture plane and propel the viewer into recessional spaces, diagonals and other devices that carry the eye from back and forth between the foreground and background, specified subject matter located in the foreground or the middle ground. Cf. Barrell 1979:4-12 and Bermingham 1986:57-85. Angas 1847 (a):218-219. Angas 1847 (b):Plate III. Angas 1847 (a):219-220. For details of the expedition see Tregenza 1980:9-10. Angas' account of the expedition is to be found in his Savage Life and Scenes, 1947 (a):117-180. Angas 1847 (a):160-161. According to Tregenza both skin and sketch are still in the British Museum collection of Natural History. Tregenza 1980:10. I am here summarising the arguments of Levao 1992:2-3. Cf. Alpers 1983:35. Alpers reaches the same conclusion in her discussion of the artifice of Vermeer's View of Delft as the border between the world seen and the world pictured. Such borders between nature and artifice are also defined 'scientifically' in mathematics and natural history. What these borders prompt is the epistemological view that 'there can be no escape from representation'.
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Nevertheless it was already an enterprise in the throes of transition. The necessary conditions of possibility for the writing of the Origin of Species and other like texts, were already well in place in other circles, and its publication in 1859 was but one example of the articulation of a very different sort of relationship between the representation of outward appearances and the generation of botanical and zoological knowledges. The 'arrival' of Darwinian thought however, was hardly disruptive at the level of the significant ideologicallink between the generation of these knowledges and the continued veracity ofthe imperial project being undertaken in nineteenth century South Australia. Cf. Anderson 1992:509-510.
Bibliography Primary Sources: Manuscript Collections and Newspapers. Cawthorne Papers, Mitchell Library, New South Wales: A103, A104, A105. Papers of the Adelaide Philosophical Society, Mortlock Library, South Australia: SRG 10. The South Australian Register, 18 June, 1836- (Originally The South Australian Gazette
and Colonial Register) Primary Sources: Published Works. Angas, 1847 (a). Angas, G.F., Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1847 (facs. ed. Libraries Board of SA, Adelaide, 1969). Angas, 1847 (b). Angas, G.F. (1847). South Australia Illustrated, London: Thomas McLean. De Mole, F.E. (1861). Wild Flowers of South Australia, London: Paul Jerrard (facs. ed. Queensberry Hill Press, Carlton, 1981). Leonard, S. W.(1854). 'On the Microscope, as Applied to Art, Science, Manufacturing and Commerce', Journal of the Society of Arts, 2, May 24, pp.460-9. Quekett, J. (1852). A Practical Treatise on the Use of the Microscope, 2nd edn London: H. Bailliere (first pub. 1848).
Secondary Sources: Books and Articles Alpers, S.(1983). The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the 17th Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, W. (1992). "Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man is Vile': Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse'. Critical Inquiry, 18(3):506-529. Barrell, J. (1979). The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, R. (1988). 'The World as Object' (1964). Reprinted in N. Bryson (ed.) Calligram: Essays in New Art Historyfrom France, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baxandall, M. (1988). Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bermingham,A.(1986).Landscapeandideology:TheEnglishRusticTradition1740-1860, Berkeley /Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bonyhady, T.(1985). Images in Opposition: Australian Landscape Painting 1801-1890, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Bradbury, S.(1967). The Evolution of the Microscope, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Bradbury, S. (1968). The Microscope: Past and Present, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Bryson, N. (1983). Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, London: Macmillan Press.
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Carter, P.(1987). The Road to Botany Bay, London: Faber and Faber. Chapman, B. (1979). The Colonial Eye, exhib. cat., Art Gallery of W A, Perth. Cooper, J.K. (1970). The Foundation of Culture in Adelaide. (Unpublished MA thesis, University of Adelaide.) Crary, J. (1990). Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Dixon, R. (1986). The Course of Empire: Neo-classical Culture in New South Wales 17881860, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Elkins, J. (1992). 'On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa', Representations, 40:33-56. Finney, C. (1984). To Sail Beyond the Sunset: Natural History in Australia 1699-1829, Adelaide: Rigby. Foucault, M. (1973). The Order of Things, New York: Vintage Books (this trans. first published in 1971; first published in France in 1966.) __ _, (1983). This is Not A Pipe, trans. J. Harkness, Berkeley /Los Angeles: University of California Press (first published in France in 1973). Fox, P. (1992). Drawing on Nature: Images and Specimens of Natural History from the Collection of the Museum of Victoria, exhib. cat., Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong. Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and Intervening, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iredale, T. (1959). 'George French Angas: The Father of Australian Conchology', Australian Zoologist, 12(4):362-371. Jay, M. (1986). 'In the Empire of the Gaze', in D. Hoy (ed. ), Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp.175-204. Jay,M. (1988). 'ScopicRegimesofModernity',inH. Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle; Dia Art Foundation/Bay Press, pp.3-27. Levao,R. (1992). 'Francis Bacon and theMobilityofScience',Representations,40, pp.132. Moyal, A. (1986). A Bright and Savage Land': Scientists in Colonial Australia, Sydney: Collins. Preziosi, D. (1989). Rethinking Art History, New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Rajchman, J. (1988). 'Foucault's Art of Seeing', October, 44, pp.89-117. Scourse, N. (1983). The Victorians and their Flowers, London/Canberra: Croom Helm. Smith, B. (1989). European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Smith, B. (with Smith, T.) (1991 ). Australian Painting, 1788-1990, 3rd edn, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Thomas, D. (ed.) (1988). Creating Australia: 200 Years ofArt, 1788-1983, exhib. cat., Art Gallery of SA, Adelaide. Tregenza,J. (1980). George FrenchAngas: Artist, Traveller and Naturalist 1822-1886, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Wilson, S.C. and Borrow, K.T. (1973). The Bridge Over the Ocean, Adelaide: Hyde Park Press. Wilson, C. (1988). 'Visual Surface and Visual Symbol: The Microscope and the Occult in Early Modern Europe', Journal of the History of Ideas, 49, pp.85-108.
Foucault's 'Statement' and Paradigm Change in Nineteenth Century Australia
In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault offers a number of directions for
understanding the modes of operation of the enunciative modalities that define and construct discourse. He enlightens us on the enabling power and extent of the limits set by rules of formation, and emphasises the need to replace the search for origins with consideration of the more generalised surfaces of emergence. We learn a fundamental rule that governs discursive formations: the discourse constructs the object at the same time it constructs its own posivitity and episemologisation (BSH 1982:61). From comments in the Archaeology, to more clearly set out claims in 'The Order of Discourse', we discover that Foucault's'object', whether a material object or the less tangible forms of knowledge, arises, however, not through regular patterns of order or cohesive sets of unities that formed the taxonomies in The Order ofThings, but out of ruptures and discontinuities. Acceptance of a shift from rules to random irregularities as a common pattern of discursive strategies requires an initial leap of faith, yet even with the acceptance of this approach, there still remains for the reader a degree of mystification when Foucault speaks of the paradoxical unit which he claims has the chief linguistic function in the discourse. This unit is the bwnce or 'statement'. Because understanding the power he invests in the statement is one of the vital keys to understanding the workings of Foucault's genealogy, I want to focus this paper on the role and function of the statement. One of Foucault's most useful comments on the statement bears repeating: ... the systematic erasure of all given unities enables us first of all to restore to the statement the specificity of its occurrence, and to show that discontinuity is one of those great accidents that create cracks not only in the geology of history, but also in the simple fact of the statement; it emerges in its historical irruption; what we try to examine is the incision that it makes, that irreducible -and very often tiny- emergence ... a statement is always an event that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning can quite exhaust (AK:28).
While I can offer only one or two examples in this paper, I want to illustrate how the 'incision' made by statements, how the 'very tiny emergence' of certain 'events' can be seen to perform effectively as catalysts for specific moments of paradigmatic change. The relation of 'statements' to events enters into this analysis since Foucault on occasion, as in the above passage, uses the terms interchangeably or together as 'statement-event' (AK:129). In 'The Order of Discourse' Foucault asks what is the status of the 'event' as a necessary component of the discourse? His answer is revealing. He contrasts the usefulness of analysing 'events' in discourse with philo-
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sophical or theoretical problems that do not bring the practicalities of the world into consideration. The implication is that the 'event' brings action and a level of materiality into the language site of discourse. In an exegesis that sums up one of the key ideas put forward in the Archaeology, he makes a distinction between analysis of the symbolic field or the signifying structure of language, and a recourse to analyses in terms of the genealogy of relations of force, strategic developments and tactics. In the former, language 'always seems to be inhabited by the other, ... it is hollowed by absence' (AK:lll). The latter is the way in which 'events' (and we assume certain statements) can be better understood and reconstituted, the genealogical approach bringing to the statement, the action and technology of sociological and cultural relations (TP: 114). In 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' this understanding of the event is confirmed when he calls the event, 'the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it' (NGH:154). The reference is to one of the chief aims of the Archaeology, to refrain from reading the text in terms of a subtext or reference. The analysis of thought, he says, 'is always allegorical in relation to the discourse that it employs. Its question is unfailingly: what was being said in what was said?' Instead, he wants us to grasp the statement in the specificity of its performance (AK:28) rather than look for a secret meaning that lies buried within ... ' (AK:109). Then we must ask, how do we recognise the statement? Foucault answers the question enigmatically: 'Although it cannot be hidden, it is not visible either ... It requires a certain change of viewpoint and attitude to be recognised and examined in itself' (AK:ll0-111). In an endeavour to escape the language analysis that looks to outside referents, he shifts the enquiry to the moment 'that determines its unique and limited existence' (AK:112). In other words, discovering the statement's specificity will indicate its nature. He claims not to have constructed a theoretical modet but freed a coherent domain of description: 'I have, if not established the model, at least opened up and arranged the possibility of one, if I have been able to "loop the loop" and show that the analysis of discursive formations really is centred on a description of the statement in its specificity' (AK:114). Most commentators are willing to be more prosaic and say that the statement is 'a serious speech act'. Dreyfus and Rabinow elaborate on this idea: 'what gives speech acts seriousness and thus makes them statements is their place in the network of other serious speech acts and nothing more' (BSH:58). In other words, there are rules of discourse which define whether a statement is simply part of general parole and vernacular forms of speech or is making a significant contribution to official or scientific knowledge. These aspects of the statement bear investigation, if statements are not characterised by their syntactic or grammatical forms, then representations which do not use language can also be statements (FP:37). We will look at an example of an image considered as statement later in this paper. The statement's place in the discourse has a strategic function that is related to object formation, but precisely what this function is, appears to depend on its location, it oscillates according to the use that is made of it'
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(AK:104). I want to suggest, however, that when it fails to perform in a similar fashion to other statements in the same location, then we should consider it with even greater interest, because I believe it is at that moment working as an agent of change. It is this aspect of the statement that I want to pursue eventually in this discussion, the statement's capacity to either signal when a particular discursive formation is about to be transformed, or to go beyond this function and activate the emergence of a totally new discourse. It is even possible that its power may extend beyond the local to perform as one of the instigators of paradigmatic change. Foucault provides an example to demonstrate to what degree the statement's efficacy rests in its immediate context, in its position in relation to the enunciative field. He explains that the phrase 'species evolve' does not constitute the same statement before and after Darwin. What has changed is the relation of the original affirmation to statements and propositions in a new field (AK:103). However, he insists the statement is not the same as a proposition; two identical propositions may constitute two different statements because they are located in different circumstances (AK:81 ). As I wish to illustrate later, the statement differs in having a function, it has a responsible task. Nor does Foucault consider the statement to be the same as a sentence, from which we assume that certain word groups which are not sentences are nevertheless capable of performing with the same force. The question posed by language analysis is: 'according to what rules has a particular statement been made, and consequently according to what rules could other similar statements be made?' The question we should ask instead, Foucault says, is based upon a very different register of enquiry into knowledge formation. It is more useful to ask: ' ... how is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?' (AK:27). To ask such a question is a tremendous challenge since the significance of the statement can only be assessed if its impact on object or knowledge formation can be estimated. It requires not only epistemological enquiry into the relevant histories of the period, but also the ability to assess the importance of the information collected in relation to the appearance of the statement. For the still puzzled reader, the notion that the statement does not need to be a sentence or a proposition is a matter of some concern. Anxiety is present because of the mystery surrounding both the statement's form and its activities. While it is understood that discursive formations produce the conditions ofpossibility for knowledge, it is also assumed that their statements also assist in producing the object, whether a distinctive material object or a large and undefined 'object' such as one of the disciplines (AK:37). Yet we have to remember that Foucault questions the assumption of origins and is of the opinion there is never a single origin but always what he calls a 'threshold of emergence'. This 'threshold' includes such things as the institution, its power and influence and the effects of struggles that take place within the discourse. However, if we attempt to understand how to isolate some of these textual movements or operations then we will not find specific examples in Foucault's writings. He says encouragingly, that when the 'statements comply not only with archaeological rules of formation, but also with certain laws for the construction of propositions, we will say that
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it [the discourse] has crossed a threshold of scientificity' (AK:187). Yet he refrains from offering the reader an example of the way in which such an event might be recognised. There are many generalised instances offered and names mentioned- Cuvier, Pasteur, Locke, Ricardo and so on but no example, for instance, of something he talks about as 'a division between what is definitely or what is not yet scientific' (AK 188). Although mentioned in a general sense, it is clear that the specificities of epistemic or paradigmatic change are not explained or documented, except in the vague terms that Foucault employs when writing of, for instance, medical science (AK:33). I believe it is possible to find specific instances of 'statements' that contribute to or even instigate important shifts, statements that are directly concerned with a recognisable change in our understanding of an object, a body of information, a group of concepts or even a new discipline. When speaking of the 'discipline' in his essay, 'The Order of Discourse' Foucault sets out similar conditions to those of discourse formation: 'a discipline is defined by a domain of objects, a set of methods, a corpus of propositions considered to be true, a play of rules and definitions, of techniques and instruments'. Certain statements become acceptable as operative within the discourse (or discipline) because there is a consensus of opinion that fixes the norm, that validates the statement of the expert. The normative is then used to make decisions on the truth value of later statements and maintain control of the operations and limits of the discourse. Those who have the authority to make decisions are called by Foucault'authorities of delimitation', such individuals or institutions exercise power in the struggles to determine the visibility of certain statements. 'Medical statements' we are told, 'cannot come from anybody; their value, efficacy, even their therapeutic powers, and, generally speaking, their existence as medical statements cannot be dissociated from the statutorily defined person who has the right to make them' (AK:Sl). Yet in an area where a discipline is in the process of formation, such authority may have to arrive from a less recognised position. If we take the discipline of geology as an example, the classification of rock formations into a particular system sets up a norm. In The Order of Things Foucault analysed a similar situation with the shift from the natural sciences to the new disciplines. New theories that suggest a different set of categories be applied to regulate inclusion and exclusion must subvert the alreadyestablished norm. The authorities who want to contend that rocks should not be grouped in this particular way must introduce theoretical premises that overturn the accepted taxonomy. A power struggle ensues, debating how objects are described and categorised. The knowledge amassed and the terms of description accepted becomes part of the newly forming discipline. Revolutionary new theories and information on rock forms, gained from empirical research, helped to transform a part of natural history, (the all embracing term for botany, biology, astronomy, geology and other fields) into the power structures and 'truths' of the discipline we now call geology. While naming and categorising rock forms took place in many areas of this continent in the nineteenth century, one of the most significant operations of geologically oriented discourse formation in nineteenth century Aus-
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tralia centred on Ayers Rock. The naming process by a white Anglo Saxon explorer positioned the rock in a discursive field of exploration of the littleknown continent, his action an exercise of the power /knowledge effect of colonialism. Despite its having lain in the red sands of Arnhem land for countless millennia, Ayers Rock began its life as an' object' for this country's Anglo-Celtic population a short time after the explorer William Gosse described it in his diary on 19th July, 1873. 'When I got clear of the sandhills and was only two miles distant, and the hill for the first time coming clearly in view, what was my astonishment to find it was one immense rock rising abruptly from the plain' (ADB:276). In citing his words, it is not Gosse's authority as author that I wish to convey, but rather instance the first intimation of an object being brought into being in discourse. Before the event of the explorer's 'discovery', his diary entry, and subsequent reference in newspapers, the monolith's six kilometre long oval shape did not exist in Western civilisation. Gosse thought the rock worth documenting because geology was in the process of becoming a science and it was obvious that Uluru was an extraordinary rock. The Aboriginal name, Uluru, did not appear in any Western discourse at that date; nor were the totemic owners of U1uru, the Yankun~a~ara people, mentioned as the original guardians of the rock. When Goose's' identification became known, Ayers Rock joined with other Australian rock formations in having a conceptual attachment to a new set of knowledges. The positioning of this object within the order of the developing geological discourse was an exercise of power/knowledge in that the information contributed to the body of evidence being amassed to support the new discipline. What I would like to arrive at, however, is an event in which we can identify a specific statement as it crosses into a threshold of scientificity. Keeping in mind Foucault's definitions of object and discourse formation, we might consider what a second explorer, Ernest Giles, wrote about Ayers Rock in his journal two years later in 1874. These are some of the things he said: Its appearance and outline is most imposing for it is simply a mammoth monolith that rises out of the sandy desert soil around, and stands with a perpendicular and totally inaccessible face at all points. Down its furrowed and corrugated sides the trickling of water for untold ages has descended in times of rain, and for long periods after, until the drainage ceased ... (Giles 61 vol.2).
Giles published journal is about the experiences of his party in facing the vicissitudes of exploration in wild, little known country. But when he claims that Ayers Rock is a 'mammoth' monolith and speaks about its being 'solid granite stone' he is making a statement that is a tentative positioning of the rock in a geological discourse. The fact that Ayers Rock is composed of conglomerate in sandstone and he was therefore wrong about the 'granite' is not the issue. In his description of statements Foucault dismisses the 'truth' value as a problem for the reader: 'the investigator must remain neutral as to whether what a statement asserts as true is in fact true, he must remain neutral as to whether each specific truth claim even makes sense'
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(AK:ill). This is perhaps the most ambiguous aspect of the statement, that its function is more important than its attachment to truth. The 'form' of the stating however, enters into the definition and the visibility of the statement. Giles' use, for example, of the word 'imposing' is not the scientific language a geologist would use if talking about the rock's geological nature today - because it is not specialised scientific language. There is nevertheless enough geological speculation- especially about the drainage, 'the trickling of water for untold ages' - to show that Giles was familiar with Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (published in 1830-32) and that he understood Lyell's claim that the world had taken billions of years to evolve. More importantly, his statement showed that he understood that causes still in action, such as the erosion from rain, proved that the world was continuing to evolve. Giles' comment on the drainage can be considered a 'statement' of a geological nature. We can position it in relation to many other sections of his published journal, Australia Twice Traversed, (1889) which describe rock formations; we can consider his various observations as aiding the construction of a geological discourse which developed the status of a discipline only in the course of the nineteenth century. Statements concerning the forms and other aspects of rocks, spoken by observers in the field, joined with the opinions of others acknowledged as authorities in newly-formed institutions. Together, these practices operated as Foucault's 'surfaces of emergence' and helped to institutionalise a section of what had been natural science into the discipline of geology. Foucault writes: 'the object does not wait in limbo the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it does not pre-exist itself, held back by some obstacle at the first edges of light. It exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of relations' (AK:45). What I now want to distinguish is the way in which the 'statement' does not need to be either a proposition or a sentence, but in fact can be a phrase or what is perhaps more remarkable, a single word. Giles travelled on to the Olgas and his journal speculates on the geological nature of these remarkable rocks: The great difference between it [Ayers Rock] and Mount Olga is in the rock formation, for this is one solid granite stone, and is part and parcel of the original rock, which, having been formed after its state of fusion in the beginning, has there remained; while the aged Mount Olga has been thrown up subsequently from below.
When Giles uses the phrase, 'state of fusion' he is telling those who have a new understanding of the meaning of the word, 'fusion' that the rock (so he thinks) was formed in fire. This is significant, a phrase that could be, I suggest, a very important 'statement' in Foucault's understanding of the term. To the initiated the word 'fusion' recalls Plutonist theories that claim the origin of the world in fire and chaos. If we wished to trace the discursive movements of that belief forward to the twentieth century then in the 1990s we have seen a renewed interest in the 'big bang theory' as part of a discourse whose 'knowledge' continues to rest in speculation. Foucault alerts us to yet another step which he feels we should consider: 'that beyond any apparent
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beginnings there is always a secret origin- so secret and so fundamental that it can never be quite grasped in itself' (AK:25). In this historically remote frame, the trope, 'state of fusion' could be considered a statement that helped to displace the earlier discourses of natural philosophy and natural history. In introducing specialised language and practices the science of geology also introduced revolutionary ideas and key concepts. The practical observations in the field began a system of classification and an' order' operating as a 'will to know' and a 'will to truth' (OD:56). Understanding and recording the evidence that pointed to the ancient age of the earth required a new language. Language played a part in validating and legitimising the discipline of geology, yet only certain statements survived by virtue of their meaning. Giles made rough sketches of the Olgas, and a line drawing was included as an illustration in the published account of his travels. The simple sketch can also be considered a 'statement' and one that played a significant part in formation of these incredible rocks for the gaze of the Western world. Foucault refers to the statement as 'an event that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning can quite exhaust' (AK:28). This is because it is connected to a vast field of other things, memory, references in books and so on. And also because it is linked not only to the situation it is in, but also to that which provoked it and to the statements which will follow from it (AK:28). While we realise that the particularity of meaning of the Olgas available to the reader in the 1870s is not the same as the advanced knowledge accessible to the 1990s viewer, (nor is it the same class of information understood by its Aboriginal guardians) further considerations must inform our understanding of attainable meanings. It would seem that discovering groups of similar statements and events is nevertheless a useful way of ensuring recognition of a particular discourse, and even more importantly, of being aware of ruptures or discontinuities when they occur (AK:33). Before it was published, sections of Giles' written description went through an 'improving' process at the hand of his editor, Mrs. Cashel Hoy. I mention this because either Hoy or Giles wrote, in a fever of enthusiasm, the following purple prose: The appearance of Mount Olga from this camp is truly wonderful: it displayed to our astonished eyes rounded minarets, giant cupolas and monstrous domes. There they have stood as huge memorials of the ancient times of the earth, for ages, countless eons of ages, since its creation first had birth. The rocks are smoothed with the attrition of the alchemy of years. Time, the old the dim magician, has ineffectually laboured here, although with all the powers of the ocean at his command.
Whether Giles had originally thought of an engulfing ocean as he stood surrounded by thousands of miles of heat, sand and spinifex is not clear, but this time the statement was true, wave action produced the shapes of the Olgas. The language used by Giles (or Mrs. Hoy) is metaphorical, and of a style associated with the movement in literature and art which we call Romanticism. The language in the process of being established as scientific, as geological, is barely present. Yet without the knowledge, the relatively
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new geological knowledge, that the world had taken eons of ages to evolve, had undergone epochs of extremes, the ice age, floods etc., this type of statement could not have been made. The information, the knowledge is there, but couched in language unacceptable to a scientific discourse. The writing must be seen in the shady area of discourse that is a discipline in the process of formation. Or, for those who consider the date of 1872 too late to talk of the new science of geology, then it could be considered as a statement that ruptures the romantic discourse which the language of the paragraph constructs- it could be read as one of Foucault's discontinuities. It would seem obvious from the concepts hinted at in this paragraph, that a 'statement' of any consequence must always introduce the conditions of possibility for a new discursive formation. It is possible to go back three centuries and position Giles' statement on the wave process, as having part of its 'secret' threshold of emergence in a famous hypothesis, Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth. With a date of 1689-90 his theory can hardly be called'geological' but it accounted for the earth's present condition as the direct result of the Noachian deluge. Burnet thought the flood occurred, however, as a result of pressure that cracked the earth's shell in several places and forced a layer of water concentric with the crust, to inundate the surface. A possible interpretation is that divine intervention had no part in a 'natural' event. While Burnet saw the worldas a result of the flood- as shapeless and ugly, he also found it 'great'. In the terminology of a later period, he found it 'sublime'. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century the two words were synonymous. Following his judgementon the flood, Burnet made a pronouncement which we can interpret as introducing a profound change of thought: 'Whatever hath the appearance of Infinite, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their excess and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration' (Burnet 1772:79). Burnet's phrase, 'stupor and admiration' recorded the experience of an overwhelming emotion- what we have learned to think of as an experience of the 'sublime'. His phrase'stupor and admiration' was a statement not particularly significant as an aesthetic in the seventeenth century. Not until the early eighteenth century is it possible to locate such statements positively within a grid that positions them in a discourse of the more recent and modern understanding of the sublime. New knowledges which emerged from studies of rock forms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, proved beyond all doubt that the formation of the earth involved inconceivable centuries of endless time and amazing evolutionary processes. Thus the explorer, traveller, and the naturalist turned geologist, gazed on certain rock formations, mountains, precipices, and other more remarkable parts of the natural world, and if sensible of the new scientific theories of creation, recalled the immeasurable time involved in the evolution of the world. If they were individuals of sensibility, also familiar with the aesthetic concepts attached to Romanticism, they experienced a feeling of the sublime. This was a different sublime from that experienced by their eighteenth century cousins. What had been in the Romantic era an aesthetic judgement of the mountain or volcano which
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made no final conceptual determinations of the object, (Kant) became in this geologically oriented time, a different employment of the cognitive faculties and for some, a more overwhelmingly sublime emotion. In documenting these experiences, it is possible that a word only will sometimes indicate this momentous new knowledge and the overwhelming feeling that accompanied its recall. As I have mentioned, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the word 'great' was synonymous with 'sublime' When it was said that the view of the mountains was 'great' the single word was a statement articulating a particular aesthetic, and indicating a whole cultural discourse. What I contend then, for Foucault's statement, is its ability to operate as a small group of words or even a single word, as we found above, in the word, 'fusion'. The capacity is present in this word or in a word-group, to disrupt an already formed discursive field and to introduce a new discourse. When the' statement' is read and understood by members of an interpretive community, that is those who already possess some knowledge of the concepts or theories involved, the conditions of possibility for the formation of a new discourse is heightened. While it is necessary to consider the institutional site as the body which retains the authority to define the statement as a special unit in the discourse, I want to suggest that the statement can nevertheless operate without that sanction when the discipline is in the process of formation. The examples above demonstrate that attempts to describe the space in which significant statements are made needs to be extremely specific, but their relationship to the institution can be vague or in the process of formation, and their identity an equally ambiguous construct, only able to be grasped in relation to other units in the same space at the same time. While it is understood that the descriptive statement is only one of the modalities present in the discourse which became the discipline of geology, the new discourse also presupposed many new practices, the most important of which was a particular way oflooking at things, an observation of the earth that had regard to a different set of regularities and rules. This was an important transformation. And as we have seen, the actual position of the new statement in a language space could also operate as a rupture to the lexical similarities and syntactical strategy of the original discourse. This is why, in Foucault's view, the relationship between the statement, the language in which it operates, and the 'thing' to which it refers, (including practice)hasalwaysahiddencontentwhichisseldomclearlysituatedinone discourse only. What is clear is that the introduction of the geological statement into a Romantic discourse was in this case the signal of something extra, something quite different, which I have outlined here in these examples, as the manifestation of the sublime. Whether the sublime considered under these conditions can meet the criteria raised by Kant; whether it remains an aesthetic when it is informed by an understanding of scientific knowledge or concepts, cannot be debated here. What this situation does also suggest, however, is confirmation of Foucault's claim that a group of statements is 'far from referring to a single object, formed once and for all, and to preserving it indefinitely as its horizon of inexhaustible ideality' (AK:32).
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Rather the 'object' undergoes shifts of meaning under an interplay of rules that make possible a specific reality of the object only under certain conditions and for a given period of time.
Bibliography Michel Foucault (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock. (Abbreviated as AK.) Michel Foucault (1980). 'Truth and Power' in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972, Colin Gordon (ed.) Brighton: Harvester Press, pp.109-133. (Abbreviated as TP.) Michel Foucault (1981). 'The Order of Discourse', in Untying the Text: A PostStructuralist Reader, Robert Young (ed. and intro. ). Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp.48-78. Foucault, Michel (1977). 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Donald F. Bouchard, (ed. and lntro.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, ,pp.139-164. Writings on Foucault Cousins, Mark and Athar Hussain (1984). Michel Foucault, London: Macmillan, p.88. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester Press. (Abbreviated as BSH.) McHoul, Alec and Wendy Grace (1993). A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject, Melbourne University Press. (Abbreviated as FP.) O'Farrell, Clare (1989). Foucault: Historian or Philosopher, London: Macmillan. Sheridan, Alan (1980). 'Discourse, Power and Knowledge', in Sheridan, (ed.) Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. London and New York: Tavistock. Shumway, David (1989). Michel Foucault. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. White, Hayden (1978). 'Foucault decoded: Notes from Underground', in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, edition 1985, pp.230-260. Other sources
Australian Dictionary ofBiography, Douglas Pike (ed. ), Vol. 4 1852-1890. (Abbreviated asADB.) Ernest Giles (1889). Australia Twice Traversed: The Romance of Exploration, 2 vols., London: Samson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington. Burnet, Thomas (1772). The Sacred Theory of the Earth, London. First published as Telluris Theoria Sacra, London, 1680-1690.
Governing at a Distance: the Colonisation of Australia1
How can distant or foreign places and times be gathered in one place in a form that allows all the places and times to be presented at once, and which allows orders to move to where they came from? Talking of power is an endless and mystical task; talking of distance, gathering, fidelity, summing up, transmission, etc., is an empirical one (Latour 1990:56).
In the branch of scholarship that uses Foucault's 'Governmentality' paper as
its starting point, 'governing at a distance' has become something of a buzzword. Researchers such as Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (see especially Miller and Rose 1990; Rose and Miller 1992) have sought to make a contribution to our understanding of practices of government in liberal and advanced liberal states by wedding Foucault's work on government and power to Latour's conception of 'action at a distance' (see, for example, Latour 1990). Briefly, both Foucault and Latour refuse 'magical' explanations of power as a possession, stressing instead the importance of studying power as the dynamic force which gets things done; following on from this, they both approach the study of power as an empirical rather than a philosophical question. In Foucault's terms, the study of power is the study of how one actor may act upon the actions of another (Foucault 1982); in Latour's terms, it is the study of how the few may dominate the many, or how some actors persuade other actors to do things for them (Latour 1986). In addition, Foucault drew attention to modern liberal forms of governing as requiring not so much a confrontation between governor and governed as a reshaping and loosening of the governmental relation. Sexuality, for example, is governed through the reshaping and realignment of desire and pleasure which requires a' distant' mode of the operation of power (Foucault 1978). And as Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish, (1977) modern power is simultaneously both absolutely discreet, in that it is invisible, and absolutely indiscreet, since it is (obviously) everywhere (Foucault 1977). This invisibility and distance in modes of governing is reflected in Latour's work, where distance between people, places and representations (and between representations and the objects they represent) is precisely the problem to be overcome by the person who wishes to dominate another. Modern forms of government, then, are necessarily to some extent 'government at a distance', in thatthey do not rely on 'presence' to guarantee efficacy. That is, the omnipresence of power does not require a physical presence. The practice of colonialism in the nineteenth century required many innovative governmental strategies to deal with the problem of distance which was perhaps rather more evident than in the efforts to govern the home nation; the' absence' of government could be compensated
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by the installation of systems of 'omnipresent' power. And it is precisely in these settings and with these problematisations that questions of confidence and fidelity came to the fore for liberal government. In the many histories of colonial government and of the formation of colonial administrative bureaucracies, much attention has been paid to the formal, legal aspects of the relationship between coloniser and colonised; many biographical and other studies, for example, have attempted to lay bare what made the colonies and colonial administrators 'tick'. Yet what is often missing from such accounts is an analysis of how colonial rule might be justified: how colonial administrators came to have confidence in what they did. Although it might be objected that the history books are full of such accounts, the 'confidence' of colonial administrators is often treated as a magical or self-evident attribute; the activities of such administrators, frequently, are implicitly or explicitly regarded as subject to a form of problematisation specific to colonisation, which often means that 'anything goes' if it fits in with the demands of the mother-country. It can be easy, then, to regard colonial administrators either as a collection of self-serving and self-motivating individuals, or as an anonymous group of bureaucrats who derive the legitimacy of their actions from the (self-evident) legitimacy of the mother-country. The last works of Michel Foucault (1985, 1986) draw our attention to the problematic nature of ethical self-justification. First of all, Foucault speaks of a possible interrelation between practices of government of the self and the government of others. This suggestion on its own might be seen as providing a justification for an examination of colonial governors' own ethics, or their rapport as Foucault puts it as a way into understanding the character of colonial government more widely. Second, for Foucault, an examination of the ethics of the ancient world was instructive because here Foucault saw examples of groups of people attempting to construct for themselves a way of life outside a set of moral'norms', a scenario which Foucault thought echoed some more modern concerns. This work is important because it allows us to throw into relief modern forms of self-problematisation which are ethical' rather than 'moral', and to allow us to understand practices of self-fashioningandtheachievementofwhatwemightcall'self-justification' in times and places when these are not simply 'given' to the individual by an externally-imposed moral code. The government of the nineteenth century Australian colonies is a field where this analysis of ethics, rather than morals, might be useful. The growing literature which seeks to understand liberalism, not simply as a political philosophy, but as a kind of permanent problematisation of the legitimacy of rule and of rulers (see, for example, Rose and Miller 1992), is suggestive here: it is necessary to understand the nineteenth-century liberal administrators who sought to govern the Australian colonies as attempting to form practices of government in situations where a simple set of moral codes was not given to them. A cursory glance at the history of AngloAustralian relations in the nineteenth-century suggests that the problematisation of rule was ever-present, for example in attempts to come up with policies regarding Aboriginal land rights. 2 0f course, the 'bad cop' approach to the Aborigines is not being denied or excused here; what is
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worth mentioning is that there was also a parallel'good cop' set of manoeuvres, and what is inescapable is the way in which colonial rule involved a permanent self-critique: a critique which concerned both power over others, and what might give a ruler authority to rule. Briefly, then, the field of nineteenth-century colonial liberalism is one in which 'rule' is not selfevident. There is a second reason why the government of the Australian colonies necessarily was a space of the problematisation of the rule over others and of one's own authority to rule: what has been termed the tyranny of distance (Blainey 1966). The problem of the distance of the colonies from the coloniser meant that administrative rule became problematic not just because of the impress of liberal thought. The everyday mechanics of running the colonies were no doubt awkward (and there was a double problem of distance with Australia- there are huge distances from London to the colonies, but there are also huge distances from the primary colonial administrative centre (Sydney) to the other colonies). However, the problem of distance also meant that a series of novel administrative solutions needed to be constructed, as will be detailed below.
Fidelity techniques How, then, might colonial administrators come to have confidence in themselves: to forge a set of ethics? The cult of Hellenism can provide some hints as to how this might work. Hellenism, or an interest in the ancient Greeks, almost as soon as it arose in England became linked to practices of government in the Australian and other colonies. Very briefly, the ancient Greeks provided colonial administrators with a variety of resources: not just codes of private and public manners (Macintyre 1991), although this was indeed the case, but also a means of conceptualising the ethics of colonisation, of thinking about the relationship between coloniser and colonised, and, through close readings of prestigious ancient texts, a set of guidelines for handling practical situations (Ogilvie 1964). First of alt we should note that the English obsession with the ancient Greeks was, as Frank Turner (1981) points out, a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the tendency was to regard European civilisation rather as Roman and, of course, Christian (Turner 1981:81; Jenkyns 1980). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, there was an important shift such that the Greeks came to take the theoretical space once occupied by the Romans, and to be seen as more relevant, or at any rate as more similar to the English. More precisely, the Greeks were seen by many as providing 'a means for achieving selfknowledge and cultural self-confidence within the emerging order ofliberal democracy and secularism' (Turner 1981:xii). This was, perhaps, primarily because the Romans were regarded as instantiating a predominantly military empire, while the Greek empire was read as an empire of a rather different character. Particularly important was the supposed civilising and cultural mission of the Greeks. The predominant view of the British Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century was much more consonant with this reading of the Greeks than with any Roman equivalent. Of course, this
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necessitated something of a rewriting of Greek history. Virtually all the eighteenth-century histories of Greece were anti-Athenian and pro- the overtly militaristic state of Sparta; an important point about the nineteenthcentury cult of Hellenism is that it was a cult of Athenian Hellenism. The Athenian experience, then, was one which seemed to speak to the Englishman concerned with problems of colonisation. Virtually everyone who writes about colonisation in the nineteenth century has something to say about the relevance of antiquity as a way of approaching contemporary problems. Most writers derogate the Roman military system of running an empire, and praise the Greek model. So, for example, an anonymous speaker in Melbourne in 1861 can claim: Their system of colonization [and here he is referring to the French] resembles the Roman, their colonists are soldiers, and the country becomes in their heads rather a military post than a commercial state. We resemble the Greeks. The Colonies which they founded in Asia Minor,ltaly and Sicily rivalled the parent state in the cultivation of literature and art; their Government was free, but they still looked to the mother country for protection and assistance, and held themselves under a very strong obligation to befriend and assist her in all her difficulties (Anon 1861:4).
John Dunmore Lang (1852) devotes a large section of his book on Freedom and Independence to an account of classical methods of colonisation. He again notes how Roman colonisation was merely the establishment of garrison towns, while the Greeks were concerned with a cultural mission. For Lang, as for so many others at the time, colonisation is a lost art; the English can regain their sense of how to practise the art of colonisation by an attention to how the Greeks conceptualised their colonising role. Edward Freeman contrasts how England has become distanced from its colonies, especially America, and he predicts the same fate for Australia; the root cause of these actual or impending colonial disasters is the fact that we are not united as Athens and its colonies were (Stephens 1895:1I:180). Many writers on colonial issues despaired of the situation in the colonies because they were not so balanced as England (see, for example, Buller 1840; Lang 1854; McCombie 1850). Very roughly, it was thought to be impossible to form a sound nation if all the constituent parts of English society were not present. It was therefore seen as important to have all classes of society represented in Australia. The model here is the Athenian colony, which by being a miniaturised copy of Athens, feels an affinity and a loyalty to the mother country which does not need to be enforced. W.E. Gladstone, in favour of Australian self government, again likened this to the Greek rather than the Roman method of empire, based on ties of sentiment and mutual benefit, allowing, as he put it, 'perfect freedom and perfect self-government' (cited in Macintyre 1991:66). Many argue in favour of the Australian colonies being deliberately constructed to have within them all classes of society, and suggest that problems in the colonies stem from the absence of an aristocracy as well as the consequent lack of an appropriate morale. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, instrumental in the setting up of South Australia, subscribed to this view, and along with influential commentators like Charles Buller and Bishop Hinds, suggested that successful colonisation depended on trans-
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planting what he called 'the whole tree' of English society to Australia (see Wakefield1849;Buller1840;ParliamentaryPapers1850:xi(CMD:1163),54ff; LetterofFitzRoytoGrey21/6/1849;C013/75:22/3/1852;C013/79:22/3/ 1852). This way of arguing is also seen in parliamentary debates on Australian immigration from the 1840s onward which routinely deplore how low the quality of most intending immigrants was. There were similar responses from administrators in New South Wales, who complained about the colony being used as a dumping ground for paupers (CO 210/443:No 3658). Experimental colonisation companies were set up to try to improve the quality of person moving to the Australian colonies, but it is clear from, for example, the private correspondence of FitzRoy that these companies still were not getting it right. What is important about these debates is that they are all conducted with explicit or implicit reference to an assumed to be successful classical practice. The Athenian colonies were bound to Athens by ties of affection precisely because they were like little Athenses. Consequently, the solution to the ills of the Australian colonies were seen in following this example and introducing the same balance that England had. The Classical influence, then, was especially important in attempts to make Australia as like England as possible. As I have already suggested, this was a technical means of governing and ensuring a particular type of citizen with an ethical commitment to the empire. There are many examples of this tendency. In 1858, Edward Lytton, the Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, set up the colonial honours system, which explicitly set out to establish a kind of Australian aristocracy, and this in spite of his known dislike for that class (Knox 1992). This invention of an honours system served the double function of making the beneficiaries of honours more faithful to England, as well as making Australian society more balanced. This was a continuation of the earlier effort by W.C. Wentworth in 1853 to make certain ranks of Legislative Councillors into an hereditary aristocracy (Knox 1992). Other writers in the period dwell on the lack of a gentry, and on the over-representation of men in the Australian colonies (The Unknown 1865; Reports of C.L. and E. Commissioners 24/2/ 1851). The argument here is that a variety of solutions to import 'balance' into the Australian colonies were made thinkable by attention to the problems of Classical colonisation practices. In slightly different vein, the planners of both Melbourne and Adelaide, which were built with streets conforming to a grid pattern, made references to the Greek use of the grid as an appropriate topography for a colony and thereby justified their own choice of the grid. It was seen to have advantages in eliminating dangerous spaces, and it made the administration of cities much more straightforward and rational from a distance. So, for example, it was argued that land sales could be more easily supervised from England when the plots of land were subjected to the standardising technology of the grid (Davidson 1991). It is possible to think of programs such as these as ways of attempting to guarantee fidelity. It must be remembered that the colonisation of Australia took place in the shadow of the perceived disaster of American independence and for many contemporary political economists, it was the lack of what we might call 'fidelity techniques' which had doomed England to lose
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one of its most valuable assets. In the same vein, we might consider the attempt to introduce British flora and fauna into Australia as attempts to induce an emotional bond between Australian colonies and the mothercountry. In 1861, for example, Edward Wilson set up the Acclimatisation Society to introduce, acclimatise and domesticate 'all innoxious animals, birds, fish, insects and vegetables, whether useful or ornamental' (cited in Macintyre1991:114).1tisveryclearthatthiswasseenasanimportantproject because of the improvement of colonial morale that it would engender. The interest in ancient Greece, then, was never merely academic, but was linked up with ways of thinking about the art of government and provided rationales for experiments in governmental organisation. The interplay between Hellenism and government can be clearly seen in the number of administrators and politicians who use Greece as a resource in this way. A good example might be Herman Merivale, who was Professor of Political Economy at Oxford and delivered a famous set of lectures on colonies and colonisation (Merivale 1861), which continually referred to Greek precedent. Merivale's credentials as a Classical scholar and as an expert in political economy meant that he was first choice to take over some of James Stephen's duties in 1847 at the Colonial Office. This pattern of an interrelation between political economy, Classical knowledge and governmental activity is very common around the middle of the century. The Greeks were regarded as providing a model for personal manners and taste, yet this code of ethics spilled out beyond the private domain. Midnineteenth-century Melbourne was characterised by a rush to collect Greek antiquities for decorating houses and for private collections (de Serville 1980, 1991), and Victoria still has a disproportionately large collection of antiquities and community of classical scholars for its size. 3 Redmond Barry attempted to extend this notion of taste to the public sphere; his vision of Melbourne University, of the State Parliament, and of Melbourne's Public Library was one in which classical styles of architecture must be used, and the values of European civilisation must be upheld. Interestingly, Melbourne Public Library made no attempt to collect any Australiana (Macintyre 1991). Melbourne University, like Sydney, whose motto was, revealingly, sidere mens eadem mutato, was from its beginnings an avowedly European institution (Hirst 1988). While Barry was very scathing about his philistine fellow-colonists, privately referring to them as the Boeotian herd (de Serville 1991:245), he still clung on to the belief that noble classical buildings could effect an ethical transformation of the citizen body. He believed that the classical style of his buildings would favourably contrast with the Gothic churches and cathedrals of Melbourne, and provide the city with a much more appropriate and modern secular feel. Barry, like many educated nineteenth-century politicians and administrators, was familiar with Aristotle's Ethics, virtually an ethical guide book for the age (Turner 1981). Most important was the Aristotelian insistence on conditioning of the will and the formation of good habits. As Frank Turner has argued, in the nineteenth century the Ethics was being read with new eyes and this rereading led to a rethinking of civics. In the eighteenth century the ethics of citizenship were the concern of the upper classes; by the nineteenth century, it was thought
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that far more people in many different social groups were capable of ethical behaviour. This conception of civics drove Barry's various projects in Melbourne. Aristotle's Ethics was not the only text which was important as a resource for colonial citizenship. R.M Ogilvie has pointed out how Thucydides was recommended as a guidebook for new colonial administrators, with the Athenian general Pericles, as described by Thucydides, the model of a good governor. Ogilvie goes as far to suggest that it was Pericles' boast that rowing had made Athens what it was that led to the sudden emergence of what we might call the cult of rowing in England and in the colonies (Ogilvie tells of an English housemaster who refers to rowing as a 'way of life'). In the same way, Plato's Republic which was unsurprisingly used as a guide to statecraft, pushes the line that games are the twin sister of work; work and games together train the soul. Ogilvie suggests that the emergence of the cult of manliness and the notion of the muscular Christian made their way into late-nineteenth-century thought via Plato (Ogilvie 1964:115ff).
Hellenism: a moment of a secular ethics These examples are all instances of a tendency to rebuild ethical life in a secular direction, a tendency forcefully identified in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1965) especially chapter four. According to Arnold, nineteenth-century life was driven by two ethical tendencies, Hebraism and Hellenism. He characterised Hebraism as 'this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have'. Hellenism was 'the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense of all the new and changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly'. The final impulse of both was 'man's perfection or salvation', yet they differ in terms of their spontaneity and their moral/ ethical flexibility. Arnold regarded Hellenism as the appropriate ethics for a new age of intellectual daring. The British had failed to realise that Hebraism should be on the decline and Hellenism in the ascendant (Arnold 1965:163-8). It should be noted that Arnold's was an idiosyncratic reading of Greek culture which stressed the Greeks' ethical rationality, yet many followed Arnold in turning to the Greeks for a way of reconceptualising ethics. No doubt there are many reasons for this move4 but perhaps the most important are, first, the consideration of the Greeks as an example of morality at its sternest without the light of the Gospel. A growing interest in the possibilities of secular democracy no doubt made the Greeks seem pertinent. Second, Hegel's concept of the historical development of Greek philosophy was seen as relevant. Many nineteenth-century thinkers who accepted his view of the passage from Greek civilisation detected a similar movement in their own age. According to this famous distinction, constituted the morality residing in the unreflective custom and religion of the ancient community. Moralitt was the reflective morality that developed as the individual subjective consciousness looked within itself to discover what objective
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truth would have moral authority over it. Seen in this light, a renewed interest in the Greeks was perhaps inevitable, and one is tempted to agree with Turner's assertion that by 1850, the effect of works like Grote's History of Greece (1869) had convinced many that England was a mirror image of Athens, and that England needed to understand better how the ancient naval power had held onto its empire if the modern naval power was to do the same.
The inextricability of ethics and government What I would like to try to do now is to link up this notion of Hellenism as a progressive moral and ethical system with a transformation in the way in which Australia was governed in the nineteenth century. I have already suggested that Hellenism and techniques of government were no strangers to each other, although the meeting of these two apparently discrete departments of existence was, no doubt, an historical contingency. As Peter Miller (1994) has recently argued, one of the characteristics of modern forms of government is less and less its insistence on confrontation, and more and more its concern with the formation of calculative regimes where only the general aims of government are specified. As Miller puts it, the logic is in aligning the actions of 'free' individuals with specific objectives by enclosing them within a particular calculative regime. Miller draws on the Nietzsche of The Genealogy of Morals when he refers to this as a process of responsibilisation- the formation of calculating individuals who are given responsibility for their own conduct. In theorising a mechanism for this process, Miller draws on Callon and Latour's notion of 'interessement, 5 'interessement' is a kind of fidelity technique, involving the persuasion of those (particularly those who are distant) who need to be governed that they have a series of shared interests with their governors. The formation of a loose and approximate alignment organised around controlling central points is a feature of this process. Now in the reconceptualisation of the British Empire as Hellenic rather than Roman in spirit, this move towards a new form of governing as described by Miller, can be seen in operation. The Hellenic model was one in which colonies were expected to self-govern, with their faithfulness guaranteed by the storge, or bond of affection, they felt towards the mother-country. 6 During the first fifty years after settlement, each colony was administered by a cadre of officials. These officials were appointed from England, paid from England, and considered part of the military. In fact, their liability was to military rather than civillaw (McMartin 1959:326). Thereconceptualisation of the Empire which was assisted by the impact of Greek thought can be seen in a new approach to governing at a distance. First of all, the setting up of a dedicated department to deal with the colonies allowed for the possibility of this new type of governing. The policy of control from the centre would not have been possible without the creation of an effective central Department of State devoted to the administration of colonial affairs. This new Department was formally in existence in 1801, when Hobart assumed office as Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. It was not, however, until1812 that effective administration began. Earl Bathhurst, who was Secretary of
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State from 1812 until1827 and Henry Goulbourn, who was his Deputy from 1812 until1821, did most of the work of constructing an effective administrative department. They built 'a central machinery which could furnish information for the ministry and parliament on colonial affairs', as Helen Taft Manning put it (cited in McMartin 1959:329; see also Morrell1966). During Bathurst's fifteen years in charge, many ordered routines and procedures were established in the colonial office. However, while Bathurst, his assistants and successors concentrated on producing an administrative superstructure and in outlining the general aims of the government of the Australian colonies, it is noticeable that government on the spot in Australia was conducted in a rather loose manner. It was quickly realised that most administration needed to be conducted by making use of local talent, and colonial civil service regulations made it a condition that the governors keep an eye out for local talent to be used in administration. For example, this line from the 1843 edition of the regulations makes it clear that 'great weight must always be attached to local services and experience. Every Governor will therefore make once in each year a confidential report of the claims of candidates, whether already employed in the public service or not, whom he may consider to possess that qualification' (Rules for Colonial Service 1843:19). The Governor was responsible for the appointment of magistrates, who were the main means of administering the colonies. These were often local men, and their responsibilities tended to be defined by a geographical area rather than attaching to specific functions. Magistrates needed to be very flexible administrators, and this flexibility in this role was continued when many of their responsibilities were transferred to the newly reformed police force in 1862. In remote areas the police were often the sole salaried officials. They enforced school attendance, checked the cleanliness of dairies, supervised the storage of gunpowder, kept an eye on orphan and neglected children boarded out with private families, gave out rations to Aborigines, newly-arrived migrants and the infirm, and buried paupers. They were also given responsibility for the collection of statistics and electoral lists. They became collectors of information for policy decisions for example, they reported on the habits of Chinese immigrants, local larrikins, and how many insane, infirm and destitute there were (Hirst 1988:252ff). Essentially, the good administration of an area depended to a great extent on the talents of local personnel. As James Stephen, in a remark typical of British administrators, putitinamemofrom 1841: 'Amanofgood sense on the spot is far more likely to judge questions correctly than any number of the ablest men at a distance' (CO 201/308:£.12). Once again, Ogilvie suggests that the use of local talent and the exploitation of existing socialcircumstancesisadevicewhichisgivenclassicalbackinginThucydides, who, as we have already seen, acted as a kind of guide book for new colonial administrators. Government was conducted by ensuring an efficient circuit of information from the periphery to the centre, but the actual minutiae of police and magistrate administration was not over-defined. The supremacy of the centre was established by a variety of tactics, including the setting up of colonial office bureaucracy which acted as a hub for the receipt of information and the issuing of orders (Davidson 1991:ch 4).
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Within Australia, the telegraph was used as a means of setting up Sydney and Melbourne as authoritative centres. The first telegraph link was established from Melbourne to Williamstown in 1854. In New South Wales, the first line went up in 1858, and by 1862 the lines reached to the borders of the colony and every substantial town was connected. J.B. Hirst points out how a new town joined the telegraph network long before its roads were made and decades before railway connection (1988:253). This system enabled rapid communication between police officers, but did not substantially affect the ad hoc nature of their practice. The organisation of authoritative centres and responsive peripheries was much more about creating realms of government within which relay points can pass on administrative power or act as a means of advising and correcting from a distance. Once again, such forms of government are consonant with a replacement of a Roman model of empire with the more subtle model derived from an historically specific reading of Greek practice. To reiterate Miller's point, the formation of realms of administrative power, loosely linked to each other and to centres allows a form of control in which direct supervision is unnecessary. In addition, the gradual transformation of the Australian public service into a rational bureaucracy(see Beaglehole 1967;Curnow 1975; Loveday1959;Parker 1989; Roe 1965) installs an additional element, that of expertise, allowing decisions made at the centres to be seen as neutral and objective. It was believed that Australia could be organised according to this centre-periphery model of government, and in addition, that one day the periphery might extend beyond the continent. There was a grander vision of the formation of a distinctively free and moral empire in which the colonies would carry on the English mission. As 'The Unknown' put it in 1865: Is not this Australia the England of the South? and destined to exercise an influence in the affairs of the world equal, it may be, with that of England itself? With Africa and the English possessions on that continent on the left hand, South America on the right, the Indian Ocean open to the West, and the South pacific with its numerous islands on the East - these highways of the world- and Australia the central point of the whole, the moral counterpart, and, perhaps, counterpoise of England, what horoscopy is requisite to predict its future? (p.4). The cult of Hellenism was one of the ways in which the question of the ethical authority of government could surface. I am not arguing that the revival of this cult and the development of a new modality of government should be seen to have a monocausal relationship with each other. If nothing else, I should be happy to problematise a notion of certain ethical comportments and modalities of government as necessarily independent, a notion which the recent work of Ian Hunter (1991, 1994) has done much to undermine. Nonetheless, the change of emphasis from the Roman to the Greek seems to me to be important in allowing a shift from a militaristic and coercive system to one which stressed the utility of moral emulation. The setting up of a model prison on Norfolk Island from 1839 is a good example of this tendency. The prison was intended to be something of a moral reformatory rather than a punishment block, and needed to be run by someone of the highest moral calibre. As Lord Normanby put it, the
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superintendent'should feel a deep interest in the moral improvement of the convicts' (cited in Kociumbas 1992:174). Alexander Maconochie eventually took over the superintendent's job, and as his extraordinary 1839 guide to prison organisation shows, he took this mission very seriously. As he stated in the preface, 'the object [of the papers in this volume] ... is ... to urge the superiority of moral influence over physical coercion, where intelligent beings are to be controlled or guided' (Maconochie 1839:i). This moral influence, which elsewhere he refers to as 'moral surgery', is primarily achieved by a system of 'training', which Maconochie distinguishes from mere 'instruction': The rule or principle, then, is alone inflexible, and must be common to all Superintendents. They must first punish, then train;- punish, if necessary, by direct physical violence or constraint, because in this stage it is desirable to subdue the prisoners' minds, and fix them, in painful retrospect, on their past guilt; - but train, if possible exclusively by means of Moral Influence, of cheerful animating hope, directed to the future. They must encourage, rather than denounce, or reproach. It is a mistake, much too commonly made, to seek Reform by making Vice painful, instead of making Virtue pleasing and advantageous. This mistake is getting expelled from Schools of Intellect, and it must also quit Schools of Morals (Maconochie 1983:100-1).
Maconochie was optimistic enough about this moral retraining of the convicts to 'anticipate a period, (not distant either, were the experiment energetically made), when every species of direct coercive discipline, without exception, might be discontinued at well regulated Training Stations'. This idea would have almost every good property as a system of management, and not one bad one as regards the prisoners themselves, for it would be in the highest degree morally coercive, yet not physically obligatory at all. Every one would think he enjoyed full freedom of will, - yet every one would be under the almost absolute control of impulses, common to all, yet personal to each, and which could not fail, therefore, of generating an esprit de corps productive of harmonious effect (Maconochie 1839:103-4).
Maconochie's optimism about this moral system and its transformative effects was such that he advocated the removal of external guards: 'I would not myself have a single soldier or professed constable with them - they should themselves enforce the regulations;- nor should I have the slightest fear of hesitation in their being enforced. For why should any hesitate, or rebel? Habita fides fidem obligat (Maconochie 1839:105). Maconochie was clearly developing a set of techniques for ensuring fidelity, in a system which by privileging self-management and training removes the conflict from prison organisation, enclosing the prisoners instead within a calculative regime where they are 'responsibilised'.
Concluding remarks: habita fides fidem obligat It seems appropriate to end with Maconochie's expression in mind. The
government of the nineteenth-century Australian colonies required the mastery of a whole series of technical problems. The technical problem of the
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morale of the colonists, and of their governors and administrators, was a problem to be solved just like any other. One solution lay in the attention to what I term 'fidelity techniques'. Fidelity techniques were used to assure the faithfulness of, at first, the administrators, who were very often not from Britain; and almost immediately thereafter, the population more generally. These fidelity techniques, however, should not be read as some false ideology imposed on an unwilling subject population. The techniques were a way of understanding the business of governing: while they gave a certain cultural self-confidence to the governors and, ultimately, the population, they must also be seen as productive techniques through which the very notion of citizenship could become meaningful. 'Culture' in general was something which could practicably be 'installed' in citizens, and in this way culture and civics could feed into each other. The important point here is that modes of ethical comportment and techniques of government cannot, in this example, be seen as separate departments of existence, but coalesce in a mutually productive relationship. For a very brief period, before an anti-classical reaction killed Hellenism off, a specific reading of the Greeks provided a way of establishing a relationship between governor and governed, and an ethics of colonial life. It is important to remember that this was only one of many possible Hellenisms that could have been and were taken up in Australian history, and that the accuracy of the nineteenth-century vision of Athenian colonisation is, in a sense, irrelevant. The contingent, localised adoption of a certain ethic allowed faithfulness to be recast in a way consonant with liberal problematisations of authority and with the problems entailed by government at a distance. 1 I acknowledge the help given by the following with the ideas in this paper: Alan Collins, Ian Hunter, Stuart Macintyre, Mike Michael, David McCallum, Rob Pascoe, Gordon Tait, Deborah Tyler, Gary Wickham. 2 So, for example, the 1835-7SelectCommitteeonAboriginesinBritishSettlements makes it clear that these populations had rights, including land rights, and needed protection from the colonists. As Morrell (1966:25-6) puts it: 'The mission of the British Empire was not to win commercial prosperity or military renown but to carry peace, good government, civilization, and Christianity to the uttermost ends of the earth'. 3 I am grateful to Rob Pascoe for this point. 4 This section relies heavily on Turner (1981), especially pp.llff. 5 Interessement is perhaps best explained/ exemplified in Calion (1986). 6 One of the interesting things about this technique is that, although it first seems to be tried out on colonial administrators, it is also pressed into service as a way of convincing the population as a whole to want to be faithful, as is clear from the discussion above of Barry. the Green noun storge, loosely meaning 'love/ respect', is frequently used in discussions of the time, and is seen as encapsulating the desired relation between Britain and the colonies. See, for example, Lang (1852:125).
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References Anonymous (1861 ). On Some Features of Colonial Life: a Lecture delivered at Queenscliffe on the 15th February 1861. Melbourne. Arnold, M. (1965). Culture and Anarchy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Beaglehole, J.C. (1967). 'The Colonial Office 1782-1854', in M. Beever and F.B. Smith (eds) Historical Studies: Selected Articles. 2nd Series. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Blainey, G. (1966). The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History. Melbourne: Macmillan. Buller, C. (1840). Responsible Government for Colonies. London (published anonymously). Calion, M. (1986 ). 'Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay', in J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Curnow, G.R. (1975). 'Professionals in Bureaucracies', in R.N. Spann and G.R. Curnow (eds) Public Policy and Administration in Australia: A Reader. Sydney. Davidson, A. (1991). The Invisible State: The Formation ofthe Australian State 1788-1901. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Serville, P. (1980). Port Phillip Gentlemen and Good Society in Melbourne before the Gold Rushes. Melbourne: Oxford. __ _, (1991). Pounds and Pedigrees: The Upper Class in Victoria 1850-80. Melbourne: Oxford. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison. London: Allen Lane. __ _, (1978). The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon. __ _, (1982). 'The Subject and power', in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1985). The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon. __ _, (1986). The History of Sexuality Volume III: The Care of the Self New York: Pantheon. __ _, (1991). 'Governmentality', in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Great Britain and Ireland - Colonial Office (1843). Rules and Regulations for Her Majesty's Colonial Service. London: H.M.S.O. Grote, G. (1869). A History of Greece. London: John Murray (12 volumes 1846-56). Hirst, J.B. (1988). The Strange Birth ofColonial Democracy: New South Wales 1848-1884. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Hunter,!. (1991). 'Personality as a Vocation: the Political Rationality of the Humanities', in I. Hunter, D. Meredyth, B. Smith and G. Stokes, Accounting for the Humanities: the language ofCulture and the Logic ofGovernment. Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies. __ _, (1994). Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Jenkyns, R. (1980). The Victorians and Ancient Greece. Oxford: Blackwell. Knox, B. (1992). 'Democracy, Aristocracy and Empire: The Provision of Colonial Honours, 1818-1870'. Australian Historical Studies, 99, pp.244-64.
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Kociumbas, J. (1992). A History of Australia. Oxford: Clarendon. Lang, J.D. (1852). Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands ofAustralia. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. __ _, (1854). An Anatomical Lecture on the New Constitution. Sydney: Cunninghame. Latour, B. (1986 ). 'The Powers of Association', in J. Law (ed.) Power, Beliefand Action. London: Routledge. __ _, (1990). 'Drawing Things Together' InM. Lynch and S. Woolgar (eds) Representation in Scientific Practice. London: MIT Press. Loveday,P. (1959). 'Patronage andPoliticsinNSW,1856-1870'. Public Administration (Sydney) 18(4):341-58. McCombie, T. (1850). Essays on Colonization. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. Macintyre, S. (1991). A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World ofThree Victorian Visionaries. Melbourne: Oxford. McMartin, A. (1959). 'Aspects of Patronage in Australia 1786-1836'. Public Administration (Sydney) 18(4):326-40. Maconochie, Capt. A. (1839). Australiana: Thoughts on Convict Management and Other Subjects Connected with the Australian Penal Colonies. London: John W. Parker. Merivale, H. (1861). Lectures on Colonization and Colonies. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts. Miller, P. (1994). Unpublished MS, History of the Present, London. Miller, P. and Rose, N. (1990). 'Governing Economic Life'. Economy and Society 19(1):1-31. Morrell, W. P. (1966). British Colonial Policy in the Age ofPeel and Russell. London: Cass. (1st edn 1930 Oxford). Ogilvie, R.M. (1964). Latin and Greek: a History of the Influence of the Classics on English Life from 1600 to 1918. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Parker, R.S. (1989). 'The Quest for Administrative Leadership'. Political Science 41(2):18-29. Roe, M. (1965). Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835-1851. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992). 'Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government'. British Journal of Sociology 43(2):173-205. Stephens, W. (1895). The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman. London. Turner, F.M. (1981). The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Prospects and Considerations of a Future for the Australian Colonies: a Pamphlet. Hobart: J. Walch and Sons. Wakefield, E. G. (1849). A View of the Art of Colonization. London. (ed. J. Collier, Oxford, 1914).
Foucault, Ideology and the Social Contract in Australian History
This paper is divided into four sections. The first examines Foucault's remarks about ideology, and what I consider to be their limitations. The second section discusses the value of ideology as a theoretical tool, and draws on theworkofSlavoj Zizek. The third section explores possible points of connection between Foucault's project and the construction of ideology informing Zizek's understanding of ideology. The final section relates this connection between Foucault and ideology to a particular historical context, the convict colony through which European occupation of Australia was established. Foucault's reservations about the value of ideology as a theoretical tool are well known. He was at pains to distinguish his project from studies which focused upon systems of meaning, signification and consciousness. As a thorough going materialist, Foucault was interested in struggles rather than a system of language, in relations of power rather than relations of meaning. From the many passages in which Foucault expressed his distance from studies of ideology, I choose one as an example: The philosophy of the 'Ideologists', as a theory of ideas, signs and the individual genesis of sensations, but also a theory of the social composition of interests- Ideology being a doctrine of apprenticeship, but also a doctrine of contracts and the regulated formation of the social body - no doubt contributed the abstract discourse which sought to coordinate these two techniques of power (that is, disciplinary and bio-power) in order to construct a general theory of it. In point of fact, however, they were not to be joined at the level of a speculative discourse, but in the forms of concrete arrangements that would go to make up the great technology of power in the nineteenth century (Foucault 1978:140).
Accordingly, when Foucault wrote of liberalism, he constructed it in terms of practices rather than ideology: that is, in terms of the various arts and techniques of government, involving both a reflection upon and critique of government and also a rationalisation of its activities, rather than an articulated political project. There are certain limitations attendant on Foucault's dismissal of ideology. In this context, it should be emphasised that the status of Foucault as a contemporary thinker requires qualification. He died ten years ago and his critiques of ideological studies were outlined in the 1970s, when the shadow of Althusserian Marxism loomed large over the theoretical battleground. Thanks in no small measure to Foucault's examination of the connections between power and knowledge, the sort of Althusserian structuralist model of false consciousness, predicated upon a distinction between real and imaginary relations to material conditions, no longer seems intellectually
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tenable. Accordingly, it might be argued that one of the legacies of Foucault is to consider, in the light of recent theoretical work, to what extent Foucauldian thought might be reconciled with studies of ideology. The first point to consider here is why such a rapprochement might even be attempted. Is not a range of genealogical investigation of various discursive and non-discursive practices enough? In response, it is worthwhile considering some of the debates surrounding the governmental practice of liberalism. So-called 'liberal' thinkers such as Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham were less interested in what are conventionally regarded as the fundamental principles of liberalism - freedom of choice, open market, a spirit of competition and small government- than with how good government might be achieved. The ostensible paradox of private enterprise is that it requires an extensive state apparatus. It is worth remembering in the early Victorian period in Britain - an era marked by the rise to political influence of the classical utilitarians- a mass of legislation was enacted, covering for example the regulation of mines and factories, poor relief, education and public health (Eccleshall et al. 1984:55). These initiatives were a manifestation of the state's role as a constituent agent in the construction of morally upright citizens commensurate with the interests of liberal, bourgeois, propertied values. One of the characteristics of liberalism (and a central factor in its global influence) is that it is a form of government that occurs when one appears not to govern. 1 (A kind of Clayton's principle of government). What liberalism establishes is a narrative from government by the state to government by the self, so that individuals, in a sense, enact the ideology in their modes of being. Thus, the very success of liberalism as a practice of government throughout modern Western society is in part related to the disjunction between its articulated principles and actual operation. While this disjunction might be read as a contradiction (even a dialectic), perhaps a more theoretically enabling response would be to regard it as a creative tension. Foucauldian analysis on its own is inadequate in terms of exploring this tension. But Foucauldian analysis complemented by studies of symbolic and political capital and ideology is in a better theoretical position to wrestle with the complexities of this disjunction between practice and articulation. We can begin this complementary study with an insight from Foucault himself. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, he suggests that one of the reasons why the juridical notion of power has been so readily accepted is because power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms (1978:86). The tension between liberalism's articulated principles and its actual concern with governmental practices might be read as an example of how the concealment of mechanisms of power which Foucault refers to is secured. There is a political dimension to the argument I have been pursuing. This involves a contention that 'meaning' emerges from the retroactive act of naming, and provides opportunities for the performance and construction of alternative meanings. That is to say, that in a society which pronounces itself to be liberal and democratic, and which articulates the values of
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freedom and equality as principles of its governance, there would tend to exist more of an opportunity for marginalised groups to appropriate these signifiers in defence of their own cultural identity than there would in societies without such principles.2 This is not to provide a naive defence of liberal humanism, but to suggest that as part of the process of reflecting on ourselves as subjects constituted from certain practices of discipline and government, we should engage with the effects of symbolic capital and the opportunities these provide for creative resistance. An historical ontology of ourselves ought not to stop at an analysis of the material conditions of the emergence of certain relations of power and modes of being, but ought to take account of the various articulations and signifying practices which accompany these forces. In bringing the Foucauldian notion of a historical ontology into line with studies of signification and ideology, a few points might be stressed: 1. Signification is not a simple effect of the operations of a system of language, but always the site of a struggle. 2. The distinction Foucault makes in the early 1970s between an interest in relations of power and relations of meaning is not tenable, because the performance of meaning, quite as much as of knowledge, is imbued with operations of power. 3. In light of Foucault's studies and other recent theoretical work, a study of ideology should no longer focus primarily on the struggle between competing systems of thought, such as Marxism and Liberalism, CatholicismandProtestantism,nationalismandindividualism.Rather,itis useful to understand ideologies as overlapping and interacting performances of meaning. Accordingly, the primary focus of study should be shifted to the struggles and tensions between the interactions of ideologies and their constitutive (and effaced) others, variously conceived as bodily forces, the Real, heterogeneity, difference and life. This position might be clarified with reference to the positions of Zizek and Foucault. Zizek regards everyday life as an ideological fantasy space marking a rupture between our subjectivity and the real of our desire. The formation of the symbolic order suspends reality, and yet at the time contains the violent drives of the real in every symbolic form. The real, then, is a kind of absent presence haunting the symbolic order through which we make sense of our lives. From a Foucauldian perspective, the other is the heterogeneous materiality of bodily forces which various discursive and non-discursive practices mark out as an inscribed surface of events to form a mode of being recognisable as tempered subjectivity. For both Foucault and Zizek, the Other exists within the production of subjectivity and forever threatens to disrupt this process. As Foucault stressed, there can be no power without resistance. I want to substantiate this argument with reference to the context of Australian history and the ideology of the social contract. This social contract, articulated in the thought of various Enlightenment philosophers, had various ideological dimensions: Tory paternalism, Protestantism, liberalism, utilitarianism, and a faith in the rule of law. Historians who have studied the first European settlement in Australia- the convict colony- have
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emphasised the social contract as an integral principle (especially Hirst 1983 and Neal1991). Convicts were aware of their status as subjects with certain fundamental rights, some of which had been temporarily ceded by their conviction, but which might be recovered. Institutions such as the press and the courts were sites in which political disputes were fought out, in which emancipated convicts were successful in defending their rights against the 'Exclusives', that class of free settlers and military officers who sought to concentrate all political authority within its ranks. There was also a concern with ameliorating the capricious effects of certain arrangements. Most convicts transported to New South Wales were assigned to private masters or to government service. Some masters were benevolent, others were brutal. In response to the deleterious effects of such an arrangement, Governor Macquarie (1810-1822) arranged to have most convicts assigned to government service, engaged in an impressive programme of public works such as to lend the colony a sense of ordered and permanent settlement. Macquarie also arranged for an increase in the exploration of new territories with a view to extending the settlement. Thus stated, the narrative of Australian settlement reads like a fine example of social progress; the move to produce order and permanence of settlement and the utilising of work relations and legal institutions to ameliorate the tendencies towards capriciousness and disorder. Indeed, it seems to establish a narrative of Australian settlement as the transition from the abnormal to the normal. Having been established as a convict colony marked by arbitrary and brutal acts of punishment characteristic of a less enlightened age, and having concentrated extreme authority in the person of the governor, under Macquarie (who tends to be lauded by historians from all political persuasions) the settlement was introducing order, justice, a recognition of the rights of emancipated convicts, and the precursors of civilised living: schools, buildings, roads and so forth. And, particularly after Macquarie's departure, recidivist and' dangerous' convicts were being removed to penal colonies on the outer rim of the expanding settlement. The practice of government and the interaction of various ideological values Protestantism, paternalism, Enlightenment reason, the rule of law- had ostensibly set the colony of the path towards freedom. Indeed historianJohn Hirst (1983) felt bound to conclude that New South Wales was a society that did not really have to become free, because freedoms were well established from its very beginnings. It is in order to interrogate the basis of such 'freedom' that we might draw upon Foucault and thinkers employing concepts of ideology, notably Zizek. This is to suggest that the social contractual relations ostensibly underlying the social progress of the colony- the notion that in expiating their crimes through work and orderly behaviour the convicts might 're-enter' society as subjects with certain codified rights - operates to efface the originary act of violence upon which the society was established. That is to say, a social contract is imposed retroactively upon a historically contingent act in which a diverse array of people(s) are co-opted into a community, a process which is codified in systems of law and social organisation.
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This process can be substantiated with reference to the debate emerging from the High Court's Mabo decision in 1992, and the Native Title legislation enacted last year. While the legislation emerging from Mabo is conceived, from some quarters at least, as correcting the fundamental injustice enshrined in the concept of terra nullius, and as providing the grounds for reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, this position overlooks the fact that there was no conciliation between these peoples to begin with, and that the European settlement of Australia involved acts of invasion and dispossession as well as incarceration. One of the significant features of the High Court decision and the Native Title legislation emerging from it is that they are based upon the assumption that the Australian territory was colonised and not invaded by European settlers in the eighteenth century. This is because the principle of colonisation provides grounds for the extension of English common law as a mechanism regulating legal relations in the new colony. As Henry Reynolds writes: Once sovereignty was claimed over the various parts of Australia the indigenous people became British subjects protected by the law in the same way as the immigrant English. Immediately on acquisition, Gustice) Toohey explained, 'indigenous inhabitants became British subjects whose interests were to be protected in the case of a settled colony by the immediate operation of the common law' (Eddie Mabo and Others vs. The State of Queensland, High Court of Australia p.179 cited in Reynolds 1992:188).
When commentators and historians describe terra nullius as a legal fiction, they forget that the term 'legal fiction' is a tautology. Such forgetting has the effect of constructing terra nullius as an anomaly within the majesty of the law which the High Court decision corrects, providing the basis for a narrative of national reconciliation. Far from being anomalous, terra nullius played a constitutive role in Australian history, providing a legitimate basis for the violent appropriation of territory which, through cultivation, exploitation and alteration, supplied the economic base for the settlement. It was the Aboriginal peoples' perceived failure to 'mark' their territory (actually the white settlers' inability to 'read' and recognise their marks of settlement) which informed the rationale for terra nullius. Enlightenment thinkers from Locke on maintained that where evidence of cultivation and occupancy of territory was not evident the right of external powers to claim ownership of this territory was justified. Here is eloquent substantiation of de Certeau's point that entry into the 'scriptural economy' in which modern Western society is written and legitimated is contingent upon three factors: the colonisation of space into a place of one's own; the production of a system of objects by a dominant subject; and the transformation of a 'natural' world (de Certeau 1984: 134-6). The settlement of Australia could only proceed on the basis of writing out the original inhabitants, so that they were accorded a precarious status as existing both inside and outside the community. Conversely, the reformation of the convicts involved writing them in as subjects of law involved in the appropriation and transformation of territory (the territory of both their own bodies and that of the land in which they were inscribed).3
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Indeed, the originary acts of violence establishing the Australian community supports Zizek's case that At the beginning' of the law, there is a certain 'outlaw', a certain real of violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the reign of law: the ultimate truth about the reign of law is that of an usurpation, and all classical politico-philosophical thought rests on the disavowal of this violent act of foundation. The illegitimate violence by which law sustains itself must be concealed at any price, because this concealment is the positive condition for the functioning of law: it functions insofar as its subjects are deceived, insofar as they experience the authority of the law as' authentic and eternal' and overlook 'the truth about the usurpation (Zizek 1991:204). Zizek's argument bears comparison with that which Foucault made in 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History': 'Humanity does not gradually pass from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination' (Foucault 1971:85). If we accept, following Foucault, that technologies of power constitute the
fields in which power is exercised (disciplines, forms of knowledge, and other discursive and non-discursive practices), and, at the same time, enable the space from which voices who temporarily function as social subjects can speak as' authors', we begin to understand the sense of crisis underlying and constitutive of Australian historiography. For this field is charged with negotiating, by effacing, the fundamental act of violence upon which it, and the society of which it is a part, functions. We might also recognise that the sorts of violent acts (marking the body, terror) which comprised the penal technology of the ancient regime discussed in the opening section of Discipline and Punish, disappears into the act of writing the culture of modern society (the scriptural economy) to reappear in the form of scandalous excess and atrocities setting out the parameters or limits for the normative policing of society. From this perspective, terra nullius is viewed as a scandal which has been identified and corrected, such that the ideological fantasy of Australia as a just and humane society is maintained. This paper has sought to demonstrate the efficacy of exploring points of connections between Foucault's project and theorists employing notions of ideology, within particular historical contexts. One legacy of Foucault's thought is to challenge fixed dichotomies such as idealist/materialist, mind/body, order I violence. From this perspective, the challenge to studies of ideology is less to render them obsolete than to recast them from a focus on the supposed struggle between various world views, to a consideration of the mechanisms and practices informing the constitutive relationship between ideological values and their others. 1 My discussion on liberalism draws upon ideas put forward in David Burchell's paper, 'Liberalism and Government: Political Philosophy and the Liberal Art of Rule' (included in this collection), and the discussion which ensued.
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I am indebted to the ideas of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's book,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985, in framing these views. 3
Although, in the context of this paper, Aborigines and convicts are treated as abstract entities, this is not to disregard the gender, class, race and other politics informing the process of reformation they experience as subjects of law.
Bibliography De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, trans. S. Rendall, California: University of California Press. Eccleshall, R., Geoghegan. V., Jay, R. and Wilford, R. (1984). Political Ideologies: An Introduction, London: Hutchinson. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Allen Lane. __ _, (1978). The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley, London: Penguin. __ _, (1984). 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin. Hirst, J. (1983). Convict Society and Its Enemies, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Neal, D. (1991). The Rule of Law in the Penal Colony: Law and Power in Early New South Wales, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reynolds, H. (1992). The Law of the Land (2nd Edition), Ringwood: Penguin. Schirato, T. (1993). 'Mabo and the Politics of Community', The Voices of a Margin: Speakingfor Yourselfconference, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, December9. Zizek, S. (1991). For They Know Not What They Do, London: Verso.
Part Three Art, Architecture and Cities
Art, Politics and the History of Change
In this explorative essay I develop some diagnostical ideas designed so as to
give, once more, new content to the idea of an end of history and a turn to postmodernity. I argue that modern times are characterised by the rise and deployment of a discourse of change in history. This discourse, and ensuing discursive practices, are formative in the development of modern art and politics. I also arguethatcurrently,inartas well as in politics, we can witness a dedramatisation of the discourse of change. The dedramatisation, I somewhat paradoxically suggest, is linked to a sense of acceleration of the speed of change in history. Consequences for and programmatic options in contemporary arts and politics are highlighted. In addition, this essay suggests a perspective from which some definite content might be given to the insistent but notoriously vague idea that it is meaningful to distinguish between 'early', 'high' and 'post-' or 'late' modernity. But I will first approach my topic via a detour:
Philosophy and the modem era of change One aspect of the shift from the culture of medieval Christianity to the culture of modernity lies within philosophy. One could date the shift to the mid-eighteenth century and Rousseau's early discourses. Since then philosophy has shown an incessant interest in the changing, the contemporary, the momentary; things brushed aside quite confidently, and contemptuously, from the area of philosophical investigation by Plato and Aristotle and their medieval heirs.l With this new focus on change, philosophy was not heralding modernity, but only coping with it: the important novum in philosophy was not a new sense that philosophy is changing in its subject matter or method, although this may have been the case. More novel and important was the idea that philosophy could, and even ought to reflect on the new and changing issues of contemporary times. It is a crucial key to any descriptionofwhatispeculiartothemature,modernera,thatitwasthefirst era to define itself as the new age.2Itis trivial to say that this new epochal selfunderstanding emerged against the background of dramatic historical changes. But it is not trivial that those who understood modern times as the new age always thought of this age as being inescapably heading for further change. Philosophy, therefore, when it attempts, as I do here, reflections towards a' diagnosis of its times', is modern in two senses. Its subject matter is modern: only a culture which understands itself as constantly in flux needs to diagnose itself constantly. And its self-understanding is also modern: a philosophy which gives up its exclusive concern3 with the unchanging, becomes a discipline which accepts change as part of its selfdescription. Given this background, it is rather surprising how little attention the question of how historical change enters into the philosophical quest for
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eternal truth has attracted. Changes in the subject matter and methods of philosophy have been prominent and much discussed (the 'linguistic turn' discussion), but they have been interpreted as learning processes internal to philosophy. The question as to what extent the conception of philosophy itself is undergoing change through the new philosophical interest in diagnostical issues- in what Foucault called'an ontology of the present'- has rarely been raised. 4 I suspect that this reflects ideas about what is 'internal' and what 'external' to philosophy which might be worth further scrutiny. If one looks at art and politics the situation is different. Here we have two areas of culture which in their self-understanding have very definitely been affected by the early modern experience of changing historicat existential and cultural conditions. They also share the characteristic that changes in the way people have thought that art and politics should relate to historical change are an important part of the modern career of these notions. It is my claim that is illuminating to look at art and politics from this perspective. I also suggest that there are striking parallels in how art and politics have dealt with and been changed by change. In the 'discursive practice' organised around change in both modern art and politics we can identify three distinct phases. These we can call the early modern, the mature or high modern, and the contemporary, late or postmodern phase. This may appear trivial. But the fact that we can identify parallel developments and points of rupture in the history of modern art and politics when we look at how their respective discursive practices are formed by change provides a new rationale for this periodisation of modernity.
Change in early modernity - the time of choice From the Renaissance up to the late eighteenth century it seems that contemporary art largely defined itself through its relation to the works and ideals of antique art and art theory. This relation had become controversial and the controversy was regarded as important for the self-image of art and the self-understanding of the age. 5 The key issue then was whether contemporary art should model itself on the aesthetic ideals and norms defined in antiquity or define its own means of valorisation. The debate led to questions about the timelessness of art and its search for eternal beauty. In defining themselves and their tasks in relation to antiquity the artists of early modernity were asking whether change in cultural conditions requires change in the aspirations of the arts and the artists. Change had become an issue, finding its way close to the centre of the works of art and the understanding of art. Something similar happened in politics during roughly the same period. The question of the relation between ethics and politics, and the individual and society, together with the ideas of the social contract and progress occupied some of the most fertile minds of the period. Simultaneously popular social movements and revolutions started modelling European history. Practice produced change and theory tried to understand how people should rationally come to terms with it. In politics, as well as in art, the sixteenth, seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century remained thrilled by the novelty of change although stability and returning to the old order still seem to be real options for the
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European church and secular authorities. A rule of the mightiest (Machiavelli, Luther) or a social contract (Hobbes) which could guarantee unchanging authority and a once-and-for-all social order still figured as real possibilities in praxis-oriented social theory. The dream of permanence was challenged of course by believers in progress but even such a quintessentially modern thinker as Rousseau still contemplated the possibility of an escape from social change to the harmony of social life existing before private property and division of labour produced a demand for complex, and vulnerable, political organisation. 6 So, change was a key issue for early modern political thinkers but other options still seemed to lie open. By the latter half of the eighteenth century this was no longer the case. In the discourse produced by those such as artists, art critics, political activists, philosophers and intellectuals, who regard themselves as the interpreters and spokespersons of their times, change had become an inescapable horizon.
Change in high modemity:change as a dramatic experience With the experience of the British and French revolutions, American independence and the division of the Church in Europe, with the rise of the capitalist economy, with colonialism in a period of rapid expansion, and the rise of the bourgeoisie, change was no longer something that could be regarded as an anomaly that should be left behind. The experience of change as an inescapable, new and dramatic cultural, social, economic and political horizon lies at the heart of modern politics. The core issue of politics, from the French revolution up to the late twentieth century, has been how to deal with change, not how to escape it: social movements have fought for their kind of change; political theories, programs and parties have tried to define their version of its direction, how to master it and its goals. It has been a period of political drama in at least three ways. Firstly, politics became an issue for large sections of the population. Universal suffrage brought the task of engaging in politics before all citizens, first in the sphere of ideas, but later also in practice, at least in all countries following the Western liberal democratic model, and in countries with significant leftist revolutionary movements. So in the societies of the mature modern age everyone has had to concern themselves with politics. Secondly, the concern for politics has been loaded with hopes and fears of a most dramatic nature: the well-being of all people has been seen as intimately connected with the political direction members of each society choose. Political movements have promised progress, and the fulfilment of utopian promises. In this restricted sense it may be quite correct to call the modern age the age of progress. 7 But it should be noted that very few philosophers or political movements have regarded progress as something easy to achieve. Socialists, liberals, fascists and conservatives of all varieties have promised a better world but only if people through their action and active organisation were able to cope wisely with the challenge of change. So, in this period, which could be called modernity proper, mature or high modernity, progress has certainly been the key political issue. The third decisive way in which change defines the modern discourse on politics is through the characteristically modern sense of crisis. Change
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happens all the time. In the era of change each new moment provides possibilities which are new and bewildering. Change gives those of the modern age all the immense satisfaction and inspiration of historicised (ie. this-worldly) and secularised (ie. human-made) utopias. The flipside of this coin is that change that comes fast also brings questions and problems which are always new and which therefore constantly call for innovation and challenge the utopian dreams. This is the sense of crisis which accompanies modern politics. Time has become a scarce resource; only through right action at the right time can we see the resolution of problems which always lurk behind the scenes and threaten the realisation of the utopian potential of modern times. Modern art, or art in the period of mature modernity, is also deeply embedded in change. In this area of culture, as well as in politics, one way of looking at things is to say that artistic creativity and the discussion about its goals and criteria of success, are areas in which the modern age makes efforts to come to terms with the experience of change. It can easily be seen, if one looks at the discussion about art in romanticism, in the work of such writers as Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin, or in most of the aesthetic discourse of our century, that the experience of change in life-conditions, society, artistic goals and so on is seen as a dramatic event, and as a crisis, in the sense that the experience of change poses challenges to the old ideals and aspirations of art. I would like to point out four different ways in which the dramatic experience of change has been dealt with and has organised the discourse on art, its goals and tasks. There is, however, one important difference between my interpretation of the relation between change and modern politics on the one hand, and change and modern art on the other. Whereas the roles played by change in shaping modern politics can co-exist and build on each other, the ways of dealing with change in art, which I want to present, are typically mutually exclusive alternatives. First, there is the reaction to change expressed in the works of art and the aesthetic programs of German romanticism. 8 The mature modern era, which dawned in Europe with the Enlightenment, changed social and existential conditions bringing individuality and liberty, or at least the promise of these goods, at the expense of community and a sense of purpose. 9 For the German romantics and for Hegel this experience was an experience of crisis. The reaction by the romantics to this crisis can clearly be seen as an effort to cope with it. Art is not only an area where the moderns express their experience of living in a time of change. In the key programmatic statements of this time, art resembles politics in one important respect. It takes on the burden of giving people the means to come to terms with, or even solve, the problems that change brings along. Schiller's letters on aesthetic education are of this kind, and such is also the fragment towards a Systemprogramm which the young Hegel and his friends at Frankfurt produce in 1796/97.1° This kind of aesthetic program of course overlooks any specificity in the domains of social, economic and political life. Therefore they also overlook the need for any mediation between aesthetic experience, education and political and social organisation.
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This naivete remains a feature of what during the past hundred years has been the most visible and dramatic meeting-point between art and change (and also a major meeting point of art and politics), namely the avant-garde. The history of modern art is unthinkable without the avant-garde. And the idea of the avant-garde is that in the innovative works of art change is not only coped with, but actually created. In the premonitional gesture of the great artist the future is anticipated, embarked upon and, thereby, mastered.11 So, what in romanticism started as a problem that had to be dealt with - the fact of new social, cultural and existential conditions and the experience of confronting an ongoing challenge of change - in the avantgarde became reinterpreted as the specific space in which art can grow into heroic significance: the artist leaps into the unknown future, thereby sieging it instead of submitting to it. Change which produced a sense of crisis becomes, in the avant-garde interpretation of the role of the artist, an arena of fulfilment. The avant-garde movements which flourished in most parts of Europe especially in the early twentieth century, give ample evidence of this kind of exhilarating meeting between the experience of change and crisis on the one hand, and the creative power of art on the other. The third way modern art has dealt with the experience of change was given paradigmatic expression in the 1850s by Charles Baudelaire. As Baudelaire saw it, modern art was to be the meeting point of the changing, and therefore contingent with the eternal. 12 Ever since, the task thus assigned to modern art by Baudelaire has been one of its defining possibilities. Baudelaire's program, and more particularly, the significance others have attributed to his program, must be seen against the background of what is arguably the most unique feature of modern culture, namely the loss of metaphysical certainties. If 'God is dead', the memory of the experience of transcendent sources of meaning is still alive and many have searched for new semantic resources which, under the pressure of change, could make life meaningful. This challenge can, as so many artists and art critics have thought with Baudelaire, be taken on by modern art. Modern art, in Baudelaire's definition, is assigned the task and the power of overcoming one aspect of the modern crisis, namely the crisis of the loss of a given sense of a purpose in life. This third 'high modern' conception of the place of art in culture, with the first (romantic) conception shares the view that art can play a heroic role. Where religion and tradition leave people at a loss, art takes on the function of providing meaning. But Baudelaire's position differs from the romantic position in the sense that, for him, the function of art is not educative and not social- the work of art can meet with individual experience and open this up to communion with something eternal, but it is not within its power to unite people. Compared with the second avant-garde position, the baudelairian stress on the creative possibilities opened by change is a common feature. But the baudelairiannotion does not promise command over time- Baudelaire does not assign himself the task of conquering the future; he only deals with that, which opens up and fades away in each strange and unique moment. There remains one more relation between the modern experience of change and modern art for me to explore. This is also arguably the most
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important one. The concern with the individual, self-determination and realisation of self is one of the singular feature of modem culture. For the modems it is not clear where man can go to find meaning. It is also not clear where s/he can find the semantic resources to speak about her search. But one way of looking at modem art is to look upon it as the dimension of culture in which the modems' search for their individuality and for meaning gets articulated and embodied. 13 When seen from this angle, art becomes an arena where change and the different possibilities and threats opened up by changing conditions are explored. I would contend that the bulk of modem art lives in this mode. It differs from the three previously mentioned areas in being less heroic: art, in this view, is not an area in which meaning once lost is regained. Neither is art an arena of resurrection, creation of purpose or domination over time. But even according to this less ambitious interpretation the modernity of art is defined essentially in terms of the concept of change and crisis. Only where changing life-conditions confront men with new ethical, social, cultural and existential conditions can the artistic 'staging' of experiments with various possibilities of meeting these conditions become an irreplaceable resource for us in our search for an identity. Let me conclude, therefore, that modem art, as well as modem politics in all its varieties, is partly defined by its relation to the experience of change in the human condition. I also want to assert that the essential role played by the experience of change in shaping modem politics and art shows that the experience of change lies at the heart of the modem experience and gives mature modem times much of its probably unique sense of crisis and drama. 14 Iwillnowtakealeapforwardandexplorewhatlthinkisanewway of looking at cotemporary art and politics through the concept of change.
Change in late modernity - the end of history, or de-dramatising change In many areas of art the first decades after the Second world War were
strangely unproductive. - The promise that the artist would cope with or master change started looking quite obsolete- for what did art produce that was really new in this period?- Postmodem art is the ambiguous answer. I will propose a distinction, which I believe is new and important, between two concepts of the postmodem in relation to art. On one reading, postmodem art gives expression to, or articulates, the new experience of life, culture and society under postmodem conditions. Taken this way, postmodem art is a direct continuation of what I characterised as the fourth and perhaps dominant way in which art has related to the modem experience of change. Postmodern art continues, in postmodem times, the modem task of interpreting the new and changing conditions under which people live. I would suggest that, all works of art which during the past decades have occupied themselves with the experience ofloss of self are good candidates for the title 'postmodem art' in this sense.lS A second sense in which art could be called postmodem turns on a change in the role played by the discourse of change in art. If one looks at postmodernism as a style in architecture, literature or dance for instance, two features serve as its defining features. One is the rejection of the
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ambitious distinction between high and low presupposed in the bulk of modern art and the discussion about it. Postmodern art often protests against the call for being heroic and exclusive and turns towards the ordinary. The other defining feature of postmodern art, in this second sense of the term, is its careless attitude towards time. Time in postmodernism is not a scarce resource; the past is not outdated and the future is not important to strive for. Change is of course still acknowledged as a fact, butpostmodern art strangely distances itself from it. It does not try to cope with change. It does not try to master it, overcome it or even interpret it. It interprets and plays with anything -be it old, new or timeless. This, to my mind is the great, emancipatory achievementofpostmodernism in art. Change, which was seen as the bearer of threats and problems, is dedramatised and this way people can, at the important level of individual experience, reach a new sense of reconciliation between themselves and history. This achievement must be seen against the back-ground of the sense of an intensification, or acceleration of change, which has been a key experience of the period which has seen the rise of the debate over postmodernity. The environmental crisis and the threat of nuclear holocaust have been the most obvious new phenomena in bringing about this new sense of speed, and, simultaneously, of danger. The idea, finding expression in (some) postmodern art, that change, which has threatened to over power our minds and our political steering-capacity in the most definitive way, can be dealt with carelessly at the level of existential and cultural reactions, is, I repeat, a novel and constructive one. The parallel reaction in politics however at least to me seems to be a most dangerous phenomenon. Speaking about Western Europe, as I do here, one can indeed regard the abandonment of the utopian ambitions of politics as one of the main tendencies over the last ten years. 16 I would, however, wish to push this important diagnostical thesis still further and say that in politics one can discern a tendency to break not only with the utopian horizon, but with any ambition to cope with change. Politicians, economists and the public at large seem rather eager to hand over the tasks of politics to the autonomous, anonymous steering mechanisms of the market and the 'ironcage' of goal-rational bureaucracies, both of which are supposed to bring about co-ordination of social action, but neither of which needs to be linked to ethical and political discussions among citizens. This is the point of the Western European integration, and this is also the point of the key documents (the so called Agenda 21) setting the tone for another widely publicised political event in these times, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development.17 It could hardly be claimed that it is because the capitalist world economy has proved so constructive and promising at dealing with the environmental crisis or other areas of accelerating change in our social, economic and cultural environment, that it should be trusted more, and political efforts less, when looking for the means to deal with change at the societal level. So the question is: how is it possible that the experience of accelerating and ever more dangerous change, paradigmatically exemplified by the experience of the environmental crisis, is not accompanied by growing ambitions
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in politics, but rather by lessening concern and effort? I thinkJean Baudrillard, in his version of the thesis of an end of history, has captured the essence of an insight into why politics, which was born out of the modem task to cope with, and perhaps master, or even 'grandmaster' (in revolutions) change, fades away at the exact moment when change has become more rapid than ever. I take Baudrillard's most important claim to be that we can talk about the end of history, because we have entered times when change in our social, economic and cultural conditions comes so rapidly, and happens in so many arenas at once, that no sense can be made of what happens in culture and society, and no stories about it told. If narrativity lies at the centre of our understanding of history, 18 then modem politics has been the history of the efforts to bring human intentions into these narratives. With the explosion of change into accelerating forces producing only unconnected fragments, history, and with history, modem politics, would (in a sense) come to an end. Fatigue and exhaustion with the ever-increasing pressure brought by change can therefore really produce (and has indeed started producing) an end of history and politics. Change is rapidly becoming dedramatised, not because it does not happen, nor because people think it does not happen. In politics, there no question of dedramatising change in the way in which it dedramatised in art, where artists seem to say: change is important -let's play around with it- but change isn't everything -let's not be too deadly serious about it. In politics one carmot give up the old modem idea that change has to be dealt with without giving up the idea of responsible citizenship. Perhaps there could still be a place for high modem politics in these times of speed. One option might be to slow down change: change in social, economic, environmental, cultural and existential conditions is at least partly human-made. The changes peculiar to modem times do indeed, at least partly, arise from the changes in science, technology and other fields of activity in which conscious efforts at producing change and tools for change are made. It is therefore a real option that change could be coped with, instead of surrendered to, through the metapolitical move of conducting politics with the basic intention of slowing down change. But of course, as we approach an unknown new millennium, perhaps my proposal is more marginal than ever to what wise people sometimes call'real politics'.
1
Cf M. Foucault, 'Un cours inedit', Magazine litteraire, 207 (mai 1984), pp.35-9.
2
SeeR. Koselleck's article "'Neuzeit", Zur Semantik moderner Bewegungsbegriffe, in his Vergangene Zukunft, Suhrkamp, Ffm, 1970, esp. p.310.
3
Cf. Plato's Republic 484b and Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1026a, 10-32.
4
Recently the picture has started to change. Cf. J. Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1995.
5
One of the important debates was the 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes' in the French Academy which lasted more than two decades starting in 1687. See Hans Robert Jauss's 'Literarische Tradition und gegenwiiriges Bewusstsein der
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Modemitiit', in his Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, Suhrkamp, Ffm. 1970, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, 'Modem, Modemitiit, Modeme', in 0. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (Hrsg.): Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Band 4, Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart 1978 (pp.93-131). 6 See J.J. Rousseau's 'political writings' ie. The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations ofInequality Among Men (1755), The Discourse on Political Economy (1755) and On Social Contract (1762). 7
For some interesting perspectives on modernity viewed through the notion of progress, see G.H. von Wright: 'The Myth of Progress', in Architecture and Cultural Values, Report ofthe 4thAlvar Aalto Symposium held inJyviiskylii, Finland, on August 19-21, 1988. Printed in Lievestuore, Finland, 1991.
8 See especially Schiller's Briefe uber die iistethische Erziehung des Menschen (1793-94). Cf. the writings collected under the title Fruhe Schriften, in the Suhrkamp edition of Hegel's Werke (vol. 1), Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge UP, 1975 (esp. ch.1), J. Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Suhrkamp, Ff, 1985 (esp. ch.1-2), M. Theunissen, Selbstbewusstsein und Allgemeinheit, Zur Kritik des gegenwiirtigen Bewusstseins, de Gruyter, Berlin 1981. 9
Cf. C. Taylor, Hegel, ch.l., Cambridge UP, Cambridge 1975.
10 See Hegel, Werke 1, Fruhe Schriften, Suhrkamp, Ffm. 1986, pp.234-6. See also the note by the editors, ibid, p.628 and the references in the footnote there. 11 Cf. Donald Egbert, 'The Idea of 'Avant-Garde' in Art and Politics', American Historical Review 73 (December 1967). 12 See Ch. Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 3, 'L' Art Romantique', Paris 1889, and Walter Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire in his posthumously published Passagenwerk, vol.1, and in Zeitschrift for Sozialforschung, VIII, pp.1-2, Ffm 1939. 13 M. Theunissen goes as far as making this task definitional of modem art. He says: ' ... allewirklichmodemeKunstinszeniertdasExperiment,dasdersichunbekannte Mensch mit sich selbst macht' (1981:10- roughly: 'all truly modem art stages the experiment which man who does not know himself performs on himself'). See also Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, chapters II and III, and his article: 'Die Modeme- ein unvollendetes Projekt', in J. Habermas, Die Moderneein unvollendetes Projekt, Philosophisch-politische Aufsiitze 1977-1990, Reclam, Leipzig, 1990. 14 On the dating of crisis as a key feature of modernity from the late eighteenth century, seeR. Koselleck: Kritik und Krise, Suhrkamp, Ffm. 1973. 15 I suggest that the best candidate for giving content to the idea of an epochal shift from modem to postmodem times is the changes that could be analysed in the way people understand their identity or self-hood. Reflection on and articulation of the experience that anything that deserves the name 'personal identity' is hard to find or unreliable is a common theme in contemporary literature, film, theatre etc. Given the importance of the ironic play with the idea of identity in popular music (eg. Madonna, Bowie) the critique of the idea of a self is certainly not a privilege of 'high' culture and philosophical seminars. 16 Cf. Habermas's 'Die neue Uniibersichtlichkeit', in his book with the same title, Suhrkamp, Ffm, 1985. 17 This is not the place to substantiate my claims. Some of the background analysis is provided in my 'Remarks on the Brundtland-Report', Lokayan (Delhi), 2/90. 18 See P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1984.
A Panoptic Art History? The Dilemma of Context
A basic antinomy exists in art-historical methodology between claims of formal autonomy and claims of context (whether these be socio-historical or stylistic). On the one hand, it is claimed that art is an autonomous activity which cannot be explained away in terms of external determinates. On the other hand, there is the argument that art always emerges from a particular set of circumstances or given conditions - after all, artists do not live in isolated cocoons- and therefore such circumstances must provide some understanding of the art. Donald Preziosi has summed up this conceptual dilemma neatly in his book, Rethinking Art History: 'the true meaning of an artwork can be translated (into discourse) and ... the true meaning of the work of art is untranslatable') The ambivalent foundation of art history has its realisation in the pivotal guise of the masterpiece which is art history's paradigm of a non-paradigmatic paradigm. Simultaneously, the masterpiece serves as the exemplar of that which is irreducible to context and yet undeniably derives from, and even - quite paradoxically - adds meaning to, its context. Contextual accounts tend to challenge the aestheticist-connoisseurial gloss associated with the aura of the masterpiece. The social history of art has been the most critical in this regard- it has also been the dominant paradigm of a contextual understanding of art in recent decades. But lately the social history has been challenged on quite a few fronts. The aim of this challenge has not been to annihilate the social history but to renew its challenge. What is interesting about this is that the work of Foucault has been pivotal in informing both the critique and the potential renewal of the social history of art's critical impetus. In the volume entitled the New Art History the editors, Rees and Borzello, pinpoint some of the shortcomings of 'traditional' art history which the social history of art sought to overcome. They list its 'claim to be value-free, its belief in the impartiality of historians, its refusal to admit aesthetics and criticism as part of historical study, its suspicion of theoretical reflection, its obsession with fact-gathering and its blindness to class and gender'. 2 If the social history does address most of these issues, then it also has its blind spots. Chief among them is the thorny issue of aesthetic autonomy. A general suspicion of aesthetic matters limits the potential of its theoretical reflection, much to the discomfort of Rees and Borzello: Social art history tends to see any claim that art has a special language of its own as a smoke-screen for the deeper social reality that supports it. By stripping art of its autonomy, social history is able to regard works of art as illustrations of sexual oppression, class war, imperialism or the ruling ideas of a particular age.3
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Works, in this case, tend to be read off as emblematic of deeper, more fundamental processes. Interpretation is relevant only in so far as one needs to trace the symptoms of these processes through the work. Whereas traditionally aesthetic autonomy had been made absolute, the social history reacts by virtually obliterating it. This rather extreme switch of orientation derives from its concern to stress the historical, material nature of art over idealist understandings. 'Art as a single unit does not exist', Nicos Hadjinicolaou declares in his programmatic Art History and Class Struggle. What follows from this understanding, he contends, is an emphasis on production because all paintings - not just those deemed masterpieces 'belong as of right to the history of the production of pictures'. This is largely achieved by replacing the idealist question 'What is beauty?' or 'Why is this work beautiful?' with 'the materialist question, 'By whom, when and for what reasons was this work thought beautiful?'. 4 This questioning shifts the focus of art-historical inquiry to art production but it diminishes the capacity to consider a work apart from the dominant forces conditioning material production. Thus, the work tends to be viewed more as a reflex of these processes and this marks its major failing as an arthistorical method. And the failing is structural, not an incidental aberration. A method utilising the base-superstructure model has great difficulty broaching the question of autonomy in general. The philosopher Gyorgy Markus has explained its reductionism this way: For to give meaning to a notion of autonomy (however relative it be), one must be able to indicate not onlyfrom what, but also to do what is a given form of practice 'autonomous'. The dichotomy of basis I superstructure, however, lacks precisely this ability: to specify what are the sui generis characteristics that constitute the various superstructural practices and institutions.5
The social history of art inherits this problem and it flounders in its attempt to provide a contextual understanding of art due to its inability to conceive of autonomy in the practices it analyses. Autonomy is unfathomable, inexplicable. Yet the original critical motivations behind such concepts as base-superstructure and ideology were aimed at disclosing 'those anathematised, taken-for-granted assumptions' of theories- and those 'paradigmatic closures of thought which transform historically conditioned practical constraints into the untranscendable limits of thinking and irnagination'.6 There are few critical tendencies that do not aspire to such a level of critical acuity and vigilance. And attempts to maintain this critical vitality have resulted in the often ambivalent critiques of the social history of art which point out its problems but aim as much as anything to salvage its critical challenge. This leads to a different type of questioning that emanates from the second challenge to the social history which probes issues 'around representation as a structure ... , and the social disciplining of technologies and regimes of power ... ' 7 It is in this new orientation that the influence of Foucault is most apparent. Perhaps the most stark account of this new focus occurs in Craig Owens's polemical essay, 'Representation, Appropriation and Power'. Art history, Owens asserts, 'believes representation to be a disinterested and therefore politically neutral activity' whereas poststructuralism regards it as 'an
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inextricable part of social processes of domination and control'. 8 Interpreting artworks as integral to systems of representation transforms an art historian's critical emphasis and this is not only due to the fact that works are no longer viewed as neutral, autonomous aesthetic phenomena. The aim of analysis thereafter is no longer to uncover the implicit power relations residing within a work but to see how representation is 'an integral part of social processes of differentiation, exclusion, incorporation and rule' (RA&P:lO). Owens declares that Foucault and Marin are his models because they deny interpretative neutrality. They subscribe to a 'performative view of cultural production', according to Owens, meaning that they display an interest in what works do rather than exposing the deep layering of determinations that inform a work. The elaboration of these important differences leads to Owens' claim that processes of representation, and of representing, implicate art historians in power relations. This claim links representation to power and thus to possession. This agenda vaguely echoes the social history of art but it differs in the way that it implicates the very practice of art history: Thus, we can identify the motives of art history, at least insofar as it is practiced as a humanistic discipline: a desire for property, which conveys man's sense of his 'power over things'; a desire for propriety, a standard of decorum based upon a respect for property relations; a desire for the proper name, which designates the specific person who is invariably identified as the subject of the work of art ... (RA&P:ll).
This sceptical response to the humanistic basis of art history can also be associated with Foucault. He views humanism as entangled with a 19th century 'theologising of man'. This theologised man, Foucault asserts, is god 'incarnated in humanity' - 'man as subject of his own consciousness and of his own liberty is really a sort of correlative image of god'. 9 Owens, therefore, not only wants to show that the humanistic discipline of art history is caught up in economic and social determinations but he also claims to expose an assumption of a godly power to represent. In effect, Owens assumes the mantle of radical critique within art history and broadens it to include the power of appropriation in interpretation itself. Such an approach therefore does not assume, as the social history of art supposedly does, some neutral, exterior interpretative position from which a critique can be made. Yet Owens then proceeds to bluntly equate representation with appropriation -which, of course, includes the critiques proposed by the social history- and it is this appropriative propensity that isseenasdistinguishingrepresentationasanapparatusofpower(RA&P:17). The effect of such an overarching analysis of power is to outline a horizon of determination that appears more complete than ever. Ideology critiques at least propose a limit which can be breached, whereas the critique of power and representation poses an limitless web of manipulation and subjugation. If representation always involves the exercise of power, then what alternative can be proposed? What lies beyond representation? And where would an alternative position emanate from?lO If art history cannot escape interpreting, and by necessity representing, then it will always be guilty of
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appropriation and thus forever complicit with the apparatuses of power. The art historian is left in the role of an intellectual flagellant perpetually seeking to expurgate guilt. If Owens' argument is informed by a Foucauldian reading of representation as an assertion of power, then Preziosi takes his cue in Rethinking Art History from the Foucault concerned with the disciplining of desire. The difference is quite subtle but it allows Preziosi to forge an understanding of 'the history of the desires disciplined by art history' (RAH:158). A starting assumption is that 'structural connections among guiding metaphors' determine both the scope of the discipline and its attitudes toward such issues as ' ... the problem of the limits and boundaries of the discipline; ideas concerning the roles and directions of disciplinary practice (who is served? toward what ends?); and assumptions regarding the roles and relationships among artist, critic, and historian (who speaks? to whom? under what conditions?)' (RAH:157). This line of questioning would also appear very closely related to that asked by Hadjinicolaou and the social history of art in general. Questions about 'who is served? toward what ends?' etc., echoes the materialist questioning - 'by whom, when and for what reasons?' Preziosi, however, disputes the assumption that social art history amounts to a disruption of a 'traditional' art history. He views its supposedly radical challenges as framed within a 'dream of scientificity' which marks out art history as a modern discipline desiring scientific precision. For the social history of art, this aspiration reveals itself in a search for 'paradigms of a science of art history along materialist lines'- thus revealing a common ambition with the bourgeois methods it would seek to displace. The search for this materialist science of art history was compromised from the beginning, according to Preziosi, because Marxist writings on art history 'seem to have become immediately mired in a nostalgic nineteenth-century positivism' (RAH:162). 11 If the social history of art falls into this trap, then it can be traced to its goal of overcoming idealist aesthetics by striving to be definitively contextual- that is, by giving the definitive account of context in art history. The attempt to fulfil this goal leads the social history to overstep its original ambition of anchoring artistic practice securely in its material circumstance. Here Preziosi identifies the deterministic tone accompanying the scientific aspiration; an example being T.J. Clark's comments of 1974: It ought to be clear by now that I'm not interested in the social history of art
as part of a cheerful diversification of the subject ... For diversification read disintegration. And what we need is the opposite: concentration... This is what the social history of art has to offer: it is the place where the questions have to be asked, but where they cannot be asked in the old way (RAH:166).
Preziosi discovers a 'peculiarlypanopticistmentality' lurking in this method which he relates to such inclinations as' a causal, historical narrative' and an 'unfailing literalism in reading the historical record' (RAH:165). Thus the point of these Foucauldian critiques is to show that a neutral interpretative position does not exist in art history. 'Relations of power', Foucault argues:
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are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relations (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; ... relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play.U
This panoptic mentality is discovered, according to Preziosi, in the arthistorical propensity to forge 'an illusory unity and coherence; an ideological matrix of projections from disparate sources onto a common screen' (RAH:157). Panopticism constitutes a logic of power, Foucault contends, deriving from a mechanism that 'automatizes and disindividualizes power Ein a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes ... ' 13 Preziosi's dispute with art history can be traced to his belief that it does accede to this modern disciplinary logic of power which Foucault describes as an: ...enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, ... a fixed place, ... in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure .. .l4
These critics assume that the insistence upon context is necessary and unavoidable though- and even constitutes the most valuable feature of the social history's challenge. The most serious problem they identify in the social history's method is the naive view of representation and interpretation that accompanies the thought of context. The social art historians would appear to contend that the discovery and plotting of a socio-historical context amounts to the final word in issues of representation and interpretation. But the burning question is how does the ensuing emphasis upon the appropriative power of representation and of art-historical interpretation overcome these difficulties? Despite the subsequent plethora of challenges to the social history of art, the key issue still remains the same one that has plagued it: how do these revised critiques account for, inJohn Tagg'swords, the 'specificity of material practices of representation?' The lingering question of specificity or autonomy remains- autonomous from what? and to do what? If these questions sound familiar, then it stems from the fact that these critiques of the social history of art still have not addressed them. Such critiques address another issue entirely - that is, the often overlooked question of the power relations involved in representation and representing as well as in art-historical interpretation. Preziosi concludes Rethinking Art History with an appeal to an alternative practice that is not prefabricated and where 'there are no metalanguages, only infralanguages that, like waves on an ocean, are vantage points, which are always part and parcel of what they arise for or against' (RAH: 179). Yet if these vantage points are infralanguages and thus part and parcel of what they arise for or against, then can one appeal to a place above and beyond the prefabricated sites of art history? If these vantages points are truly part of the fabric, then they must inevitably come up against the panoptic logic of art-historical thought. How does such an analysis then resist being seduced by this drive? Does Preziosi's own analysis resist this seduction?
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The difficulty with analyses of art history that borrow from Foucault's thought is that their assessment of disciplinary determination is total- it knows no bounds. Yet if one looks at Foucault's account of immanent relations of power, then one finds that an elaboration of resistance plays a part in his analysis. Thus he argues: 'just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities'. 15 My aim is not to dismiss analysis that examines the relation between power and representation - but I do want to reject its totalisation. Owens appeals to an authentic order beyond the mire of representation. A yearning for any form of authentic underlay or 'natural' order cannot be found in Foucault, nor does it feature in Preziosi's account.1 6 Where Preziosi and Owens find common ground is in questioning the unacknowledged investments which undermine the radical status of the social art history's project. Preziosi's reliance on the Foucauldian paradigm of panopticism means that his focus tends to be fixated on the first half of his equation concerning the simultaneous translatability and untranslatability of art - that is, he focuses only upon how artworks are translated into art-historical discourse. As such it makes for illuminating criticisms of the social history of art notably by exposing its methodological propensity to determination- but it fails to provide an adequate assessment of the second part of this equation. This is significant because this' curiously double disciplinary postulation' is more revealing of the inherent theoretical intrigue implied by art history than panopticism. It is only this double postulate that successfully captures the perennially unstable and unwieldy coupling of idealism-formalism and materialism-contextualism that art history strives to put into some working balance- or, as is often the case, which art historians hope to resolve by privileging one or the other side of this equation. In effect, I contend that these recent, Foucauldian-inspired methodological critiques have sidestepped the issue of this paradoxical conjunction of autonomy and context in art history, and more or less ended up with as broad an account of determination as one could ever find in the social history of art. 1
Donald Preziosi (1989). Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p.16. Hereafter RAH.
2
A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (eds) (1986). 'Introduction'. The New Art History, London: Camden Press, p.7.
3
Ibid.
4
Nicos Hadjinicolaou (1978). Art History and Class Struggle, trans. Louise Asmal, London: Pluto Press, pp.179, 183.
5
Gyorgy Markus (1990). 'Marxism and Theories of Culture', Thesis Eleven, No. 25, p.94.
6
Ibid, pp.93-5.
7
Bird, 'On Newness, Art and History', in Rees and Borzello, (eds), New Art History, p.37.
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8
Craig Owens (1982). 'Representation, Appropriation and Power',Art in America, May, p.9. Hereafter RA&P.
9
Michel Foucault (1989). 'Foucault Responds to Sartre', Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84), trans. John Johnston (ed.) Sylvere Lotringer, Serniotext(e) New York, pp.41,38.
10 At this point it is possible to suggest that Owens has totalised a power to appropriate. One can refer to Foucault's own concerns about such a tendency in social systems: ' ... a system of constraint becomes truly intolerable when the individuals who are affected by it don't have the means of modifying it'; Michel Foucault, 'Sexual Choice, Sexual Act', Foucault Live, p.220. For a critical reply to Owens' essay, see Svetlana Alpers, 'More on Art History and Power', Art in America, October 1982, pp.S-7; and for a more general review of his work, see Stephen Melville, 'Contemporary Theory and Criticism' (a review of Owens' posthumous publication, 'Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture', Art and America, July 1993, pp.30-32. 11 Preziosi refers to Hubert Darnisch's remark (which he believes was directed at Hadjinicolaou) that 'Marxist theory had entered into art history only in its most reductivist and caricatured forms'; RAH:161. 12 Michel Foucault (1980). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, New York, p.94. 13 Michel Foucault (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, p.202. 14 Ibid, p.197. 15 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p.96. 16 See the discussion of Foucault in Megill (1987). Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, p.254.
'Making Facile Gestures Difficult': Artists, Criticality, and the Politics of Publicness
1
!R.96 (jamtt On the first of April 1991 then National Government Minister of Social Welfare Jenny Shipley stuck it to tens of thousands of New Zealanders by cutting social welfare payments. In the month prior, in Dunedin, a multimedia arts collective was established called Super 8, that has subsequently been represented by its bohemian participants as manifesting the 'need for collective activity in the face of social adversity'. 2 The Super 8 venue was subsequentlycloseddownbytheDunedinCityCouncilasafirerisk,butthis year the collective was relaunched on the third anniversary of the benefit cuts, in the Zenith Catacombs, one block from the city centre. What follows, in the nature of a murmured hesitation, is a brief examination of certain representations of the artist-personality local to my situation in Dunedin, New Zealand, and their implications for the articulation of a radically democratic vision. Paradoxically, the artist as a neo-avant-garde mannerist and variously as a neo-romantic figure simultaneously underpin art practice, criticism, and education in New Zealand; and in their contestatory relation, these two broad types, as competing modes of identification, map aspects of the terrain of cultural politics that interests me. I am particularly interested in how neo-romantic inscriptions and identificatory formations might participate in techniques of social hygiene, through small procedures of affirmation and denial, restricting the dangerous public operations of moral autonomy and contestatory speech, to bohemian ghettos and carnivalesque borderlands, ensuring the stability of a status quo in which individual political agency is radically constrained. In Dunedin, a small southern city of 110,000, artists are complicit with minute symbolic and actual practices that fashion and regulate, and the artist is daily confirmed as the still legitimate site of a lively and invigorating danger. With the insidious gentrification of the city centre proceeding along international models, but on a smaller scale, artists play a paradoxical role. While Dunedin's public art gallery will find its new home in a redeveloped retail site at the very heart of the city's business, civic and tourist district, and some galleries and artists' collectives are part of the redevelopment drive, often providing the necessary first step in the appropriation of waste sites, Dunedin's poorer alternative artist community is periodically policed from The Centre through Fire Department and City Council evictions, and through the increasing privatisation of space in the city. The very centre of the city, the Octagon, has been recently redeveloped as a plaza bisected by the main street, and surrounded by cafes, bars, a theatre, a 6-cinema complex, the civic chambers and tourist information centre, the Anglican Cathedral, and soon, the relocated Dunedin Public Art Gallery, all in concert with the Dunedin City Council's vigorous promotional campaign which
'Making j'acife (jestures 'DifficuCt'
129
proclaims 'Dunedin. It's all right here' (see glQficlU~ Rhodod<:nd.r()fl ~ll an-d Fig.l). As an accompcnhcmses., ::~rc- .'\: fitqwm~ ku~Jt ()f Pmrida';;. f-M" .urist who '!ipcdaliw ir1 plice in the redevelopment of the city, and Jtls.t out ofi(W,'Jl ~w.r ''f.n·oodtc pond'' also a threat to its is home Ocx:k of <:amid Puktk:o,. smooth homogeneity, Thh pe~nliar hini wlrh iv> di~tinaiw blut/bla{k pltam~. is ,a n&s~thj!.\."1" for the artist constitutes a Patrida's- -paiot:U1g. Nhny O{l!.t-.nlntqudy danger which is manN~·?...':ahnd bktis ll:.wt- alrt.tdy hren aged across the twin .trt;l.ny t-o axes of desire and M• not ha~ to st>l'! why,~ l\ltddrt, dread. Such city sites as the ~tmfirm£d Patric-~'s low ofho- new hlhtllt'. ·~Ibe .dcV'-dopen.l"td pW:Jt'd do~ the jv~.~ Octagon evoke an an~
elonglng to-ft communitarian ideals o.f :m.:I CMtnJI yout' of civic belonging and I lif'l.'. lt·m.lh-10 itt'!f'3t r;:h;m~;· I '""""""'"'· · . · _. . ?h~,a.::~....~......,......."................... "' participation. City plaI Dunedin. It's all,tlgbthere. zas, malls, and Dunedin's Octagon, with their wide open spaces, ease of pedesFigure 1: Artist Pat Altman in Dunedin promotional trian access, and high adertisement, "Does changing your view, change your views? incidence of cafes and It's all right here." North and South, (April1994):33; restaurants are inCourtesy of Dunedin City Council. tended to encourage certain classes of people to linger, perhaps to meet and to talk. These are spaces of intense (and usually displaced) desire, often involving a nostalgia for a communal togetherness and participation on the model of an imagined pre-modern European utopia. Yet in practice, and instead, they facilitate the exercise of possessive individualism and the unfettered pursuit of privacy: the market participation of dedifferentiated and anonymous consumers who are addressed as if possessing pre-existing identities. This is the epitome of liberal pluralism, in which the market substitutes the idea of publicness, of speech and action, with the private consumption of spectacle and nomination of choices. City malls most persistently offer pre-packaged options for which there are predetermined appropriate responses- the options of the market place mitigate against answering back, despite the seductive simulacra of participation in the question and answer formats of market surveying, and brand-name differentiation. One example of the privatisation and loss of space can be seen in the absence of legal street sites for posters. Last year in preparing for a public meeting on art politics in the community, our poster distributors were not Th~ 1.\ntt.tlit thrdem;, w~~h
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unexpectedly hassled by the police: this denial of a public sphere is achieved under the rhetoric of public safety and cleanliness. But the public defended is one much reduced in its representativeness. What is encountered in the aggressive policing of poster walls around the city, apart from the privatisation of city streets, is their designation as 'defensible space' in the face of imaginary dangers. The danger lies in the very idea of a crowd without a name, the crowd without identity- the very epitome of a radical democracy -the not-yet-packaged, not-yet-imagined 'people's voice(s)'. According to this logic, 'security' has less to do with personal safety than with insulating individuals in their 'residential, work, consumption and travel environments, from "unsavoury" groups and individuals, even crowds in general'. 3 This privatisation of the rhetoric of 'public safety' is a smoke screen which plays on the fear of the spontaneity of the masses, or the risk of the unexpected in the performance of public appearance. Symptomatic of the regulation of everyday life are Dunedin's over-policed parking meters, the 'clear-flow' one way traffic systems, and the graffiti clean-ups which have culminated in a proliferation of 'happy walls': murals and 'Keep Dunedin Beautiful' exhortations on fences, the walls of vacant lots, and bus shelters throughout the city, many of which have been produced by organised groups of school children, constituting a technique of prohibition in the name of innocence and purity. Predictably too, the skateboarders who have recently occupied the Octagon are being required to negotiate with the City Council over their forced relocation away from pedestrian areas. And most recently, last month, the Police have declared they want 3 am closing of all licensed premises in The Centre to reduce 'disorder in the central city'. 4 The publicness construed in this discourse of security, and the public approved for travel within the intensively capitalised central zone of the city, is very limited indeed. Within this regime, the disease-carrier is permitted at the periphery, but constrained by a solemn edict, under a prohibition on leakages which might contaminate the public body. And it as such, as a sanctioned viral carrier, or muta(ge)nt, that the body of the artist is construed. 'He' is a reservoir, and translated as feminine by recourse to epidemiology5 and an archaeology of creative genius. 6 A body at once chaotic and unstably bounded, the cultural inscription of the Dunedin artist is as both passive and at the same time latently dynamic, indolent and yet with the potential to be excited to spontaneous outbursts of expressive passion and the dangerous release of toxicity. In a recent Dunedin newspaper article, there is a photograph of local 'Painter Kelly Michael' (see Fig.2). He is pictured preparing for a forthcoming exhibition, standing at an easel, ostensibly working, with a palette in one hand and a brush poised as if stroking the canvas. Superficially, in the text and the photograph, the emphasis is on the 'work' of art, the artist says: 'In a way I am in a factory- it's the daily grind of a painting factory? As well as the artist and his easel in the photo, parts of the studio are visible, revealing the clutter of other work, painting rags, and paint-splattered walls in the theatrical cast of light from a skylight. Yet it is the artist's gaze which distracts me, a gaze that must be imagined because his eye sockets are deep
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Figure 2: Painter Kelly Michael, in Charmian Smith, "Artist just likes pushing paint around on canvas", Otago Daily Times, (15 February 1994):17; Courtesy of Otago Daily Times.
in shadow. It is the passive-receptive gaze of the feminine male. It is the gaze ofthepermeableandleakingimagination.IsthisagazesignifyingFoucault's 'abyss of the [art]work's absence'; a feminised 'void' all darkness and chaos around which the 'lyrical halo' is cast; the 'moment of silence' the work of art opens?S The painter's gaze is not directed at the canvas or the palette, in contradistinction to the newspaper text's emphasis on labour, neither does the gaze overtly acknowledge the photographer's and viewer's presence in the manner of the publicity photograph. Rather, it is a simulacrum of the waiting pre-requisite to creative inspiration. His gaze is directed into the inbetween, downwards into the space beyond the palette resting in his hand, into the space between his body and the other bodies framing this view of the artist. Cast down, this gaze becomes a sign of his feeling (and waiting) rather than his seeing and thinking. It is this pictorialised gaze which resignifies the studio as imagination's chamber, as the void of potential in which the artist waits, and which re-signifies the artist as the reservoir and tributary of inspiration and the gift. The reporter's text inscribes this space and the artist's waiting with the twin markers of romantic creativity: the void and the trace, the emptiness of waiting and the cluttered detritus of activity, the sign of passivity on the one hand, and of spontaneity on the other. Such readings impute to the artist personality a true or deep prelinguistic self-hood receptive to, in the artist's own words, the 'rollercoaster' ride of inspiration. This kind of romantic rhetoric is not confined to the self-definitions of a few artists in the Dunedin milieu, it also appears in the writing of some local critics, and resonates in art teaching practice nationally; and while such sentiments may not dominate, they do circulate as an accepted legitimising practice. Even practices that might elsewhere be nominated as typifying postmodern appropriative irony, in Dunedin, often get translated according
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to discourses of romantic creativity. By such means, for example in the case of Auckland artist Peter Gibson Smith, (see Fig.3) in Dunedin on a one-year Fellowship, the artist's particular techniques become the signifiers of creative originality; and appropriation, re-textualised as the manipulation of other people's images, is made to signify the artist's expressive intentionality, and the transformation of the raw into the cooked. Local art writer, Charmian Smith, legitimises the appropriative strategies of Peter Gibson Smith's work in terms consistent with notions of the artist as originator, and the artwork as gesture and trace, by emphasising the manipulative. She describes the artist as 'mixing' other people's images with his own, and she makes it clear that he copies by hand and not mechanically, thus displacing attention from the rubber stamps, and computer and fax generated imagery he employs. The writer goes on to devote most of the feature article to an explanation of the artist's techniques as experimental and novel. The accompanying photograph shows the artist apparently 'at work' on a detail, he is pictured working with his hands holding materials and applying pigment to the surface of his work, much in the same manner as manufacturing corporate images show technicians demonstrating the use of materials and equipment for publicity and product manuals. 9 Though it might be possible to read Gibson Smith's appropriation of a number of canonical European and New Zealand works as critical of notions of authorial originality, the local reading enunciated here evokes a rhetoric which instead claims certain
Figure 3: Artist-in-Residence Peter Gibson Smith, in Charmian Smith, "Manipulating images of others for installation", Otago Daily Times, (8 February 1994):15; Courtesy of Otago Daily Times.
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artists possess a unique spontaneity, and which imputes to the artwork, as the trace of the artist's life, a rejuvenating power. Such attributes are claimed to be in marked contrast to the compulsive and conditioned activity of nonartists, and the pseudo creativity of artists whose work is perceived to be theory-driven. These practices rest on a set of presumptions about the existence and integrity of a pre-linguistic expressive and self-healing subjectivity in dichotomous relation to the socially conditioned and alienated subject. The artist's spontaneity is constituted in opposition to the conformity of the regular worker and the constraining power of work's regular hours, requirements for attention, and obligation to produce a result. In this, there is something of an antipodean translation, almost a mythology, of Situationist philosophy and something akin to Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life.lo Yet, perhaps in the spirit of a hybrid Situationist detournement, many of these Bohemian artists claim their art is more individual, more energetic, and more connected to life by its spontaneous and creative revolt. While the artist is unproblematically characterised as both a reservoir and creative originator, as a receptive but also resisting free agent, difference continues to be mapped as a borderland, a refugee enclave, and the raw material for the formative work of desire as an unfillable absence, 11 with political consequences that are regressive and nostalgic. However this romanticism does not go unchallenged in the local milieu: frustrated by the promise and denial of effective political critique, one young woman artist I spoke to was critical of the adolescent escapism which she claims motivates many to drift from one distracting extravaganza to another, across an ocean of sleep and waiting. Why is spontaneity so important in the mythology of Dunedin's Bohemians? So dangerous to the techniques of discipline? Is it because it relies on an essential passivity as its precondition? Or because it is the opposite to compulsive activity, and seemingly beyond discipline, outside the limits of governance? Is it because it is the opposite to work, both manual and mental labour, in its unrestrained exercise of the imagination in complicity with the passions and the desires? 12 In the tradition of the avant-garde there is claimed an intrinsic link between this spontaneity and criticality. A criticality that can be both metaphoric and actual, founded upon the assumption of the primordial immediacy of the artist's expressions. But this criticalityisfundamentallydifferentfromthatwhichFoucaultpracticesand proposes, for his is predicated on a claim of solidarity, that 'after all, we are all governed'. 13 Avant-garde criticality however assumes that spontaneity is a relatively rare phenomenon. The implied moral aesthetic in dichotomising spontaneity and conformity, the primordially expressive and the conditioned subject, is not as useful in thinking through the need for, and means of, deep transformations of political agency, as is a Foucauldian criticality. 'Marginal by imposition, by choice, by necessity', 14 this ghetto-dweller may, at one time or another, or in one relation or another, be critically engagedbut not so intrinsically. And why would the artist find the margins hospitable anyway? Is this the romance of the outlaw? What are the pleasures of the ghetto, of daily crossing its threshold bearing its mark before others? What
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Figure 4: Photographs and program notes for 'Fatigue', created by Jules Novena Sorrel and Ozzy B.S. Y. Act 3 of 'Black Umbrella', a Super 8 performance event held at Zenith Cafe, 9-12 June 1994; Catalogue text reproduced by the kind permission of Jules Novena Sorrel.
hybridity promises here? Perhaps the tenacity of the arts collective Super 8, closed down once already, and currently under Police surveillance in the hope they will breach licensing laws and grant officials the opportunity to close them down again, perhaps Super 8 currently exists as an effective site of 'psychogeographical experimentation' in the spirit of Situationist ideals: in the hope that such sites (to quote the spirit of '68) 'enable people to stop identifying with their surroundings ... to jam their messages, to turn their songs inside out'.15 While romantic formulations of the artist's role circulate within the Dunedin bohemia of artists, poets, musicians, and art writers, they do so among other competing self-definitions. The Bohemia has also fostered a neo-pagan carnivalesque and an anarchic communitarianism that, despite the romanticism, appear to be informed by some astute political understandings of the dominating effects of new right economics. In the establishment, moth-balling, and recent re-establishment of the artists' collective Super 8, and in various carnivalesque festivals and theatrical events (see Fig.4) there is a hard-headed pragmatism about the kinds of social and cultural politics that are effective in organising and maintaining communitarian programs that can sustain a cultural collectivity. Though neo-romanticist, the carnivalesque territory they have established and maintained, serves the dual functions of opening 'spaces of withdrawal and regroupment' in response to 'exclusions within dominant publics', and providing 'bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics.'16 Dunedin's bohemians, the bearable poor, many subsisting on the tattered shreds of state-welfarism, on the state-subsidies of
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unemployment and domestic purposes benefits, maintain a carnival zone within the central city, wherein it may be politic to be a romanticist, or to be a neo-pagan communitarian as a strategy of resistance and as a means of providing a glimpse of pluri-vocal and anarchic possibilities, or simply as a supplement to the disciplines of poverty and a desire for collectivity. To call this community of artists, poets, musicians and art writers carnivalesque also invokes the paradoxical recognition that all carnivals act as a safety valve for the status quo, fulfilling the role of the dominant's other, confirming the fallacious logic of the Same/Other dichotomy. And in the Dunedin context, it is young women who are establishing a power base with the re-opening of a Super 8 venue, and it is perhaps paradoxically women who have the most to gain and to risk from the transgressive and experimental haven of a Modernist bohemia, given that which has emerged in Dunedin has expanded the space accorded to women in relation to categories of artistic greatness and chains of influence which serve to legitimise and unify an artist's work into an oeuvre. Paradoxically, because the conservative romanticism pervading Dunedin's Bohemia serves to perpetuate the myth of the feminine male as the creative genius, and finds the neo-pagan eco-feminism of many young artists unproblematically essentialist and reassuring. It is a risky double-bind for these women in that male participants insistently map the sexual terrain of this Bohemia heterosexually, in contradistinction to the bisexuality of many of the women. Yet these readings are too facile without the recognition that Bohemian Dunedin also constitutes a discursive sphere that coheres on integrationist, cooperative and non-hierarchical practices in resistance to dominant discourses, within a context of values debate. (Values which include the ideal of work without self-interest, and a largely non-careerist orientation, althoughsomewithinitstillflirtwiththeromanceofmarket-place'discovery' on the model of Dunedin music's international cult success. 17) A bohemia within which, and by which, counter discourses are being invented and circulated in response to the exclusions within dominant publics - much in the marmer proposed in Nancy Fraser's notion of'subaltern counterpublics' .18 By these young artists assuming a publicist orientation (as they have through performance art, writings, interviews, various collective actions and programs, and the manners of their very appearance in public 19) discursive space is expanded. But spontaneity and moral autonomy are aestheticised by their association with the artist. Thus neutralised, on thearguablyfallaciouslogicthatthe symbolic forms a dichotomous pole to the social, they can be released into the public body in benign forms, as traces, effecting, at best a marmered rejuvenation that is skin-deep. In the reification of the art process and object as commodity, and as fetish trace, and the postmodern proliferation and pluralism of consumer and lifestyle choices, there is an oscillation of promise and denial, a schizophrenic dance between the promise of change and the inadequacy of the fetish. The promise of profound transformations of bodies-politic and public territories is both tantalisingly offered, and at the same time denied, by the often plenteous opportunities for voicing indignation while nothing changes, and in the recurring rituals of nominat-
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ing political choices in talk-back shows, opinion polls, and the electoral ballot. And in the realm of the symbolic, there is enacted an art-cargo-cult, a border trade between the apparently private realm of choice and desire, and constructs of a unified body politic which seeks to possess and incorporate its imaginary other in fetishised and sanitised form, seeks to supplement its lack without disrupting its imagined unity, and homogeneity. But the cleanliness of this border trade is much over-rated. Exchanges that reify and fetishise the artist's supposed spontaneity and criticality do not guarantee the hygienic impermeability of bodies politic and spaces public. This artist-as-such is the differend, precisely that which cannot be reduced and remains left out of the consensual body politic and betrays what is really at stake in the contestatory domain of politics, betrays even the very source or occasion of political dispute: betrays the 'startling unexpectedness' of speech and action. 20 I propose it is this unexpectedness, which of itself can signal the opening of a public space, which must become the stuff of the politics of publicness. A publicness that manifests itself as a plurality of competing publics rather than as a single, comprehensive public sphere, and a politics that is constituted in the constant collision and tension between claims for freedom and demands for rights. While art practices, readings, and education in New Zealand rest on the unquestioned assumption that both unexpectedness and critique are located in the moment and movement of art making, in the body and works of the artist, and in the cargo-cult fetishism of art as the trace of the artist, these practices will also participate in the limitation of political subjectivities and the idea of agency. They will be complicit with strategies which limit the danger and unexpectedness of mere appearances in public and the perils of speech, and thereby, the neutralisation of publicness and any idea of a participatory democracy beyond the nomination of choices and the voicing of indignation. Yet in the Dunedin context it is possible to witness the complex association of these romanticisms with the formation of a subaltern counterpublic that has tenaciously achieved a fragile and transgressive publicist occupation in the central city, and which is participating in the critique of dominant logics. Such a reading of Dunedin's Bohemia seeks to avoid the facile gesture of dismissing its contesta tory status on the grounds of its romanticism, and refuses to assist in the validation of any rhetoric which sacralises the social as the only political reality. It is, finally, to claim that visual culture can and must participate in the diffusion of politics, and the proliferation of competing publics across all domains, both symbolic and actual, with any means at its disposal. 1
I am grateful for helpful comments from Robin Craw, Sarah McMillan, Linda Tyler, Mandee Wilson, and Katy Yiakrnis. The title phrase of this paper ('Making facile gestures difficult') is borrowed from Michel Foucault, 'Practicing Criticism' with Didier Eribon, in Lawrence D. Kritzman, (ed.), Michel Foucault Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, Routledge, New York and London, 1988, p.155.
2
Super 8 Newsletter, 1(April1994), unpaginated; see also 'Super 8, An Ode To the Shakers and Movers', SPeC, 3(Winter 1991), p.6-7.
3
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Vintage,
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London, 1990, p.224. Steve Addison, 'Police want 3am closing in Dunedin', Otago Daily Times, (17 June 1994), p.l. 5 A case can be made for a conceptualisation of the porous body as female, and as endangering the hegemonic body, in the identification of AIDS-at-risk groups as the hazardous perimeters and thresholds of the continent of 'The Public Health'. In its use of hydraulic models to explain the transmission of disease, Catherine Waldby argues that epidemiology characterises the transmitters as fluid, and the transmission processes as a leaking or see page. The contagious cells, bodies and populations are conceptualised as reservoirs and tributaries, both metaphors of containment with the risk of spillage, and lacking fixed boundaries. As such it is only the receptive body that is conceptualised as the threat in that it contains the contagion, and it is women, homosexual and bisexual men who are seen as receptive, borderless, and leaking. Conversely, the heterosexual male body is the only one imagined not to have permeable boundaries, it is penetrative, not receptive, it is in fact rigidly bounded. Catherine Waldby, 'AIDS and the Body Politic', HRC Regimes of Sexuality conference paper, Canberra, July 1993. 6 By the end of the eighteenth century genius had acquired Romantic grandeur: transformed from a kind of talent into a superior type of being who walked a sublime path between sanity and madness, between the monstrous and the superhuman. To be a genius was to be like a madman, but not a madman; and to be like a woman, but not a woman. The male genius was inspired, a shamanic mouth-piece, and feminine, instinctuat emotional and capable of giving birth metaphorically. See Christina Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, The Women's Press, London, 1989. 7 Charmian Smith, 'Artist just likes pushing paint around on canvas', Otago Daily Times, (15 February 1993), p.17. 8 From Michel Foucault's discussion of art and madness with which he concludes Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard, trans. New York: Vintage Books, 1965/1988, pp.287-88. 9 Charmian Smith, 'Manipulating images of others for installation', Otago Daily Times, (8 February 1994), p.15. 10 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore, Verso, London and New York, 1991; originally published in 1947 as Critique de la vie quotidienne. In typifying the regular worker as constrained and conformist, and the artist as spontaneous, these artists and writers rework a construct familiar in the writing of Lefebvre and the philosophy of the Situationists. For instance, in Lefebvre's claim that festivals contrast violently with the alienation of everyday life, but that they are not separate from it, 'his critique of everyday life is a dual reading, at once a rejection of the inauthentic and the alienated, and an unearthing of the human which still lies buried therein'. (Michel Trebitsch, in the Preface to Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life, p.xxiv.) In Dunedin artist Emily Buttle's Wellington performance entitled 'the fabulous non-event', timed to coincide with both the International Arts Festival and the Fringe Festival early in 1994, three performers employed the Situationist strategy of derive (drifting in costume throughout the city, and occupying friends' homes) until they could stand it no more. See 'emily buttle', SPeC 14(Auturnn 1994), unpaginated. 11 Such a claim recognizes desire can be conceived as lack and the drive to supplement the perceived loss through the fetish, a notion derived from Freud's conception of desire. However desire need not be construed negatively: alternatively it can be conceived, in the tradition of Foucault and others, as a positive force of production, as the drive towards a vision, or a sense, that something better is attainable. Such desire is that which articulates and produces the not-yetrealized. And, it is such a desire which I claim is at work in the Dunedin Bohemia when I argue later that artist's collectives such as Super 8, among other things,
4
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constitute counterpublics, and, in their dual character as places of withdrawal and launching pads for the dissemination of their discourses, produce'oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs'. See Nancy Fraser, 'Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy', in Francis Barker, et al. (eds) (1992). Postmodernism and the re-reading of modernity, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, p.210. 12 Michel Foucault makes this assertion in Madness and Civilization, p.248; and Donald Kuspit makes a similar connection between the artist and freedom from work in The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p.120, n.51) in the context of discussing avant-garde art as a process of perpetual therapy when he cites Philip Rieff who describes 'the therapeutic [as] a man of leisure, released by technology from the regimental discipline of work. .. ' in The Triumph of the Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith after Freud, New York: Harper and Row, 1968, p.236. 13 Michel Foucault, 'Face aux gouvernements,les droits de l'Homme', a document written and read by Foucault at a press conference in June, 1981, on the plight of the Vietnamese boat people; first printed in Liberation, (30 June-1 July 1984), p.22; cited in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, Harper Collins, London, p.316. 14 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, 'Cotton and Iron', in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West, (eds), Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and The MIT Press, York, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, 1990, p.330. 15 Attila Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem, 'Elementary program of the bureau of unitary urbanism', in Ken Knabb, (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, California, 1981/1989, pp.65-67; cited in A. Bonnett (1989). 'Situationism, geography, and poststructuralism', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 7:136-7. 16 Nancy Fraser, 1992, pp.210-211. 17 For local research on the Dunedin sound, see Craig Robertson, It's 0 K, it's all right,
oh yeah': The 'Dunedin sound'?: an aspect of alternative music in New Zealand 19781985, 1991, an unpublished thesis for a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in History at the University of Otago, Dunedin; held in the Hocken Library, (#090280555). 18 Nancy Fraser, 1992, p.210. 19 I am thinking particularly of such artists as Emily Buttle, Jules Novena Sorrel, Donna Demente, writer Louise Wilton (now in Auckland), artist, designer and publisher Caroline McCaw, and the existence of collective studios and practices such as 'Moonscream Studio' (Demente's studio space which functions as a centre for neo-pagan experimentation in performance, music and costume, and the base for 'The Theatre of Alchemy' founded by Demente),'Fidias Fortisse' (a group of four artists who make collaborative paintings), the collective 'Super 8' in their new home in the Zenith Cafe, also the publishing platforms of SPeC (the Otago University Students Association Radio One Magazine), and SNAFU (an occasional publication by members of the 'Super 8' collective). See Emily Buttle and Danny Butt in conversation, 'emily buttle', SPeC, 14(April 1994), p.unpaginated; Jules Novena Sorrel and Louise Wilton in conversation, in Louise Wilton, (ed. ), SUBstance/subSTANCE, SPeC, Dunedin, (September 1993), pp.9-11; and various speakers in Rob Garrett, (ed.), Beautiful and So Inexpensive: A Town Meeting Project, South Island Art Projects and Rob Garrett, Christchurch and Dunedin, 1993. 20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1958/1971, p.178.
Foucault's Gaze
Introduction This paper is about space, about power and about death: it is about seeing, the gaze (adapted from The Birth of the Clinic 1973:ix). Michel Foucault's exploration of the gaze developed from his empirical investigations of madness and medicine. The gaze is a technique of power /knowledge that creates and exploits a new kind of visibility, of organising people so that they can be seen, known, surveilled and controlled. The gaze gives power to the all-seeing so that they might cure the ills of the gazed upon. The gaze means death to the private: the transgressing and resetting of the boundaries between private and public. In this paper I demonstrate, by surveying the spaces of the central business district and residential suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, that the gaze implies both looking and being looked at. The self gazes, but is also dependent on the gaze of the other, a notion threatening to the self. In the CBD security cameras gaze upon passers-by who, in turn gaze into shop windows at images or fantasies of themselves (their bodies both as they are and as they would like to be). In the new residential suburbs, often contained by walls and gates, high status, high-tech castles are gazed upon but protected from the other by security systems which monitor and watch. Inside, the occupants gaze at their television sets, watching representations of the 'real' world outside. In the complex interaction between the gaze and power, power and space, space and social subjectivity, identity is contingent. We gaze and are gazed upon, private and public, controlling and controlled, sane and insane, alive and dead. 'The Gaze that envelops, caresses, details, atomises the most individual flesh and enumerates its secret bites is that fixed, attentive, rather dilated gaze which, from the height of death, has already condemned life' (Sheridan 1980:42). The 1994 Burswood Casino scandal in Perth testifies to Sheridan's statement. In what has been termed 'rape by camera' (Watson 1994:3), surveillance camera operators in the Casino zoomed in on, taped and passed around the video of women's breasts and genital areas, women changing clothes and urinating.
The Gaze The eyes are found to have acted as a social signal from early in the evolutionary scale. Whenever organisms use vision, the eyes become signals as well as channels of sight (Argyle and Cook 1976). Mutual gaze is well known to be emotionally arousing. Depending on the situation, mutual gaze or awareness of being observed may lead to attack, encouragement or withdrawal. Gaze is often used or reacted to as a signal of threat. An incapacitated subject may prefer to withdraw or modify their behaviour
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rather than challenge the actual or perceived power of the gazer. A subject who feels that they have more power than the gazer, may, alternatively, choose to attack. Gaze thus plays an important function in reflecting social hierarchy. It is only in the primates and humans that gaze functions as an affiliative signal (Argyle and Cook 1976). Women and men can exchange glances of friendship, love, conspiracy and so on. In other species, gaze is primarily a signal of aggression. It is this aggressive interpretation of the gazewhichFoucaultinheritedfromSartreandLacan.Sartre(1956;1960),for example, tells of the watcher in the park whose gaze is initially unchallenged, the sovereign surveyor, but the idea of a centralised subject becomes progressively dismantled when the watcher becomes threatened by the entrance of another. The gazer is in turn gazed upon, and becomes not a viewing point, but viewed, objectified. The master becomes the slave, the Other. Lacan (1978) reworks Sartre's story, dispensing with the idea of the personalised Other. He suggests that between the subject and the world are the discourses of visuality, a cultural construct influencing how the gazer interprets what s/he sees. The viewing subject, therefore, does not stand at the centre of a perceptual horizon and cannot command the unfolding visions. We stand, instead on the field of the other. This form of seeing on the field of the other, Lacan terms 'seeing under the Gaze' (Bryson 1988:94). For Lacan, the Gaze is full of menace and the viewing subject's 'entry into the social arena of visuality is intrinsically disastrous' (Gryson 1988: 107). Lacan's vocabulary is that of menace, terror, capture and death. The Gaze is essentially powerful, menacing. Lacan's ideas of the Gaze thus naturalise menace and terror, itself a terrifying notion. From Lacan's portrait of the menace of vision, Foucault has drawn his analysis of how power uses the social construct of vision; how power conceals its operation and how power exploits this new visibility to see, know, survey and control. In The Birth of the Clinic (1973), Foucault links the gaze to the development of clinical medicine after the end of the eighteenth century. 'The clinic is born in a gaze whose domain is the threat of destruction - The clinic necessarily entails death and transgression' (Lemert and Gillan 1982:71). The individual body is held in subjection by the gaze. As I will demonstrate below, the surveying gaze in our cities may be regarded as an attempt to cure the body of the city (the city corporate) from the social ills (disease) that threaten it with violence and destruction. The gaze watches for (potential) acts of transgression on the part of individual subject bodies, threatening them with an institutionalised response if they do not conform or withdraw. The act of seeing generates knowledge about the seen. Power (the gaze) and knowledge are thus intertwined in the concept of power /knowledge. The gaze is asymmetrical. It is unidirectional in that the gazed upon do not know when they are being watched. It is a technique of power /knowledge which enables administrators to 'better' or 'more effectively' control their subject populations. Foucault uses Bentham's plan for the Panopticon as a paradigm of the gaze. The original Panopticon was an architectural figure: an annular building surrounding a central tower. Both constructions were pierced with
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corresponding windows enabling constant surveillance: 'the Panopticon mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognise immediately' (Foucault 1977:200). Through disciplinary spatial ordering, the Panopticon brings together power, knowledge and control of people through the dual imposition of axial visibility and lateral invisibility (Berko 1992). I will demonstrate this concept, in particular, with reference to the city centre and suburbs of Perth. I read the Panoptic on at two levels; of architectural brick and stone and of its imagery, of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form. It is a figure of political technology, 'a type oflocation of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organisation, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power' (Foucault 1977:205). The idea of the Panopticon reverses the principle of the dungeon as an instrument of control and terror. Depth is replaced by height, secrecy and hiddeness by transparency and openness, dark by light: 'the majestic violence of light, which is in itself supreme, brings to an end the bounded, dark kingdom of privileged knowledge and establishes the unimpeded empire of the gaze' (Foucault 1973:28-29). Panopticism is a form of power that has not disappeared since Bentham's time, but has for transcended its original conception. The notion of 'the eye of power', 'eyes that must see without being seen' (Foucault in Rabinow 1984:189) and 'a faceless gaze ... thousands of eyes posited everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert' (Foucault 1979:202, 217) is now apparent in the micro- and macropractices of surveillance cameras, spotter planes and satellites. Inspection functions ceaselessly, the strength of its power emphasised by its invisibility and the fact that its subjects are uncertain whether they are being observed at any particular moment. We are deprived of privacy. All our actions are made public. We accordingly surveil ourselves, becoming relatively docile bodies. Compulsory visibility and the gaze thus regulate or normalise behaviour without recourse to violence. 'The object of power is everywhere penetrated by the benevolently sadistic gaze of a diffuse and anonymous power, whose actual existence soon becomes superfluous to the process of discipline' (Jay 1986:191). The legacy of the eighteenth century 'discovery' of continuous, functional surveillance has been a movement from the state using it as a simple disciplinary blockade given to negative functions) (to neutralise dangers, to keep useless or agitated populations in their place and to avoid the problems caused by assemblies of too great a number (Foucault 1977) to a more supple and subtle process of control, a mechanism capable of being used by virtually anyone. In this paper, I look at the physical exercise of the gaze as surveillance in both the city centre and suburbs of Perth. It is a mechanism used by the state, private institutions and individuals to monitor and control behaviour of the other. The gaze incorporates the intolerable into the controllable (Sorensen 1994). The gaze is thus fragmented into an extensive network of power structures. The increasing number and forms of new instruments of surveillance has expanded both the pools of surveillors and subjects for surveillance and produced the possibility that everyone may 'not only be the object of surveillance, but its subject as well' (Berko 1992:63).
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In looking at the gaze in the city, I recognise that the notion of the gaze as power and that of space are intertwined. 'Space is fundamental in any exercise of power' (Rabinow 1984:252). The gaze consists in using the disposition of space and architecture within space for social, economical and political ends. The normative mobilisation of space and architecture rests on the ideas of visibility and surveillance, both being seen and seeing. In response to Ewald's (1992:171) suggestion that we should find out why architecture, stones and walls are so important in the normalisation of space, I offer the duality of an architecture that is no longer built solely to be seen, but to observe those both within and without. Stones can make people docile. Walls confine and exclude. In contrast with the physical heaviness and visible bulk of buildings, stones and walls, the lightness of hidden cameras and surveillance equipment renders spaces and passages transparent. High-tech surveillance is always alert. It establishes presences and absences, knows where and how to locate individuals, sets up communications, interrupts others, and is able to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess and judge (Foucault 1977:143). Similar to Foucault's notion of the gaze is Debord's (1983) conception of the spectacle. Debord (1983:4,3,1) suggests that 'the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images'; it represents the' deceived gaze' and 'false consciousness' in which 'everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation'. I will demonstrate how such images, represented through video camcorders, TV screens and dummies in shop windows all serve to coordinate and profound a' chilling metaphor' (Caws 1991:242) of anomie in the contemporary urban environment. Before I turn to the examples of the central city and suburbs of Perth, I need to introduce briefly the concept of the flaneur. The flaneur is the impassive stroller, the man (sic) in the crowd who moves about the streets and places of the city observing but not interacting, gazing at people and sights (Benjamin 1973; de Certeau 1984). The flaneur has unconstrained freedom to look at without being watched or even recognised in the act of looking. The flaneur is a voyeur. There is a hierarchy of flaneurs in the city. The network of surveillance equipment is itself a flaneur, gazing at others, without interacting, while the others themselves are in turn flaneurs, strolling through the city centre or suburban streets gazing through shop windows or across garden walls at commodities. As Wolff (1985) and Pollock (1988) both argue, the flaneur is intrinsically male. It is men who are free to walk around the city, staring at others, unconstrained by domestic duties. The male nature of the gaze is unchallenged, based as it is in the hierarchy of the sexes. There could not be a female flaneur, a flaneuse. The act of gazing is a masculine act, that of being gazed at is feminine.
Perth, a surveilled city centre The Central Business District is the heart of Perth's retail and office space. On weekdays and Saturdays the shopping streets, arcades and mall are crowded with people purchasing, strolling and gazing. After the shops close in the evenings and at weekends, there are no local residents to populate this
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monozoned area, gates are locked across arcades and spaces public by day. The only inhabitants appear to be commuters hurrying to the railway station, groups of young people wandering aimlessly, or the homeless. The core area of the CBD is known as Citiplace. It comprises two open pedestrian malls (Hay Street and Murray Street), a paved open space (Forrest Place), a major shopping complex anchored by Myer and several small arcades linking the parallel malls together. Overhead walkways connect Citiplace to the main railway station and a bus terminal, car parks, and the art gallery, library and museum complex. Within Citiplace pedestrians rule and traffic is relegated to roads at the boundary. Citiplace symbolises Western consumer society. It is a place where spending and consumption are encouraged; a veritable 'paradise for shopping' (Winchester 1992:146), a vision of 'shoppingtown as Eden' (Morris 1993:303). Citiplace sells the image of a comfortable lifestyle, wining, dining and wearing the latest fashions. Shops and major department stores focus on clothing and footwear, predominantly for women. The concept of women as consumers is part of the complex patriarchal structure of society as a whole, the city centre and the gaze in particular. Women purchase for their families and for themselves. Shop windows tell the world what items 'good' mothers are buying for their children and partners and also reinforce the image of women as sexual objects to be beautified. 'The focus of prime-site stores on female fashion indicates and perpetuates the notion of the woman as adornment, a decorative adjunct to the real business of the city which is conducted by men' (Winchester 1992:149). Women gaze into shop windows as palaces of dreams, fantasy images of themselves/their bodies both as they are, reflected in the glass, and as they would like to be. Bodies instantly become slender, tall, young and white, exuding vitality and independence. Women are normalised into ideal types, sporty and fun or stylishly professional, by chain store looks. Store windows offer an (albeit temporary) escape from reality into a new identity, offering the promise of curing all ills, as being becomes degraded into having and having into appearing. Over fourteens (in size) or over fifties (in age) have no place in shop windows, exemplifying the tension
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between the production of a body to be looked at and a body in which to live. How many women are seduced by such fantasies? How many spend amounts they can ill afford, incurring the threat of debt? How many diet and over-exercise to fit into an idealised shape, risking anorexia, bulimia or even death? In such instances the gaze is not all-powerful and controlling, but has been seduced and manipulated by careful marketing strategies. The shopper's gaze may be unidirectional, but it is met by the stony dead stare of the other, in this case, the models who, touting their wares, tempt the gazers and threaten their very selves. Although engaged in the act of gazing, shoppers do not have the liberty of the flaneur. How many realise that they, in turn, are being gazed upon? There are surveillance cameras in many shops, in the casino, in banks and automatic teller machines, at the bus station, in car parks and in the streets of Citiplace itself. Allen (1993) documents that in 1991 Perth City Council installed Australia's first public shopping mall video surveillance system. There is an integrated network of over fifty cameras, mounted in opaque perspex domes about three metres above the street. The cameras are monitored from a central control room where Council operators can pan, zoom, playback scenes or produce still photographs twenty-four hours a day. It gives real meaning to the Council's logo 'see you in the City'! Most Citiplace users, according to Allen, seem unaware of the cameras' presence. They are accepted as part of the cityscape and may be mistaken for lighting fixtures. The surveillance apparatus in Citiplace was intentionally designed, not to protect the safety of the public, but rather to protect the shops and their contents from the violations of the public. Place is hierarchically valued higher than people who are categorised as being either 'good' or 'bad' by virtue of their behaviour in an urban space. 'Good' shoppers spend money. They consume. They do not steal or damage the commodities for sale or the urban infrastructure itself. In contrast, 'bad' subjects, using the area for nonconforming, non-consuming purposes, are to be swept away like litter, moved out so as not to disrupt the legitimate ambience of consumerism. Davis' (1992) account of Los Angeles illustrates the steps the city 'fathers' have taken to reserve an idealised CBD for those able to consume. Barrel-
Perth CBD
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shaped, bumproof, benches make sitting uncomfortable and sleeping impossible; overhead sprinklers operate at random at night, programmed to drench sleepers in parks and doorways; while a seafood restaurant protects its refuse in a cage 'made of three-quarter inch thick steel rods with alloy locks and vicious outturned spikes to safeguard priceless mouldering fishheads and stale french fries' (Davis 1992:233). While Perthmaynot (yet) resemble Los Angeles, people entering Citiplace have no choice in becoming subjects of surveillance. The gaze means death to their privacy, death to their unconstrained liberty. Freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of assembly no longer exist. Every action is observed and recorded by officials in the privacy of the control room; officials with the power to repress undesirable or take pin-up photographs of desirable individuals. (See Allen's (1993) account of the secret photography of Craig Turley, sex symbol of the West Coast Eagles football team.) The gaze is objectifying and alienating. Were we aware of being gazed at in such a manner, Wilson (1988:205) suggests that we would feel' anguish and shame in thus being deprived of one's freedom, one's transcendence, and fixed and limited by the look of the other'. Does the surveillance system, as suggested, cure the ills of the gazed upon? Allen (1993) suggests not. Whilst retailers may feel themselves and their premises to be more secure, statistics on crime rates are inconclusive and notoriously unreliable. It would also appear that graffiti artists and others are discovering new ways by which to outwit the cameras. Resistance may be possible. In conclusion to this section I believe that the gaze of the Citiplace security cameras cannot be analysed separately from the ideology of consumption. The cameras are part of the construction of a site for consumption in which people themselves gaze, become normalised and threatened or menaced by consumption itself. The self thus gazes, but it is also dependent on the gaze of the other, a notion threatening to the self.
In Burswood Casino On Monday July 4th 1994 Channel7 television network's Real Life program
showed parts of a two-hour videotape of revealing close-ups of women at Burswood Casino which security camera operators had filmed between 1987 and 1990. Operators monitoring cameras located in women's toilets and artiste's changing rooms as well as in the car parks and main body of the Casino had zoomed in on women's exposed breasts, genital areas and buttocks, together with couples fondling each other or having sex, generally behind large indoor plants, and a woman urinating in the car park. Individual sequences from the 4-year period had been edited onto one tape and shown locally at house parties by the operator(s) responsible. Cameras in the casino are hidden in ceiling fittings and under gaming tables. Patrons are kept unaware of their existence because: 'if people knew that their activities both inside and outside the casino were being recorded, they might be dissuaded from patronising the premises' (Archer 1994:3). It is interesting to note that Stephen Archer, speaking here on behalf of Burswood Resort Management, is more concerned with the possibility of a financial 'downturn in business', than the potential decrease in 'criminal
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activity' that self-policing would create. Media coverage of this incident with headlines such as 'Tape "rape by camera"' (The West Australian 1994a) and 'Sharp eye in the sky tracks you on the sly' (The West Australian 1994b) has caused major public outrage in Perth, not solely over the You ne\·er know who'll be watching. hidden cameras in the casino, \light as well look your best. but also on discovery of the The Bt·a Bur cameras in Citiplace and elsewhere. There are some 200 private companies in Perth Advertisement for lingerie boutique day after operating in a booming secuBurwood Casino video appeared on television rity industry in which some $4 m. is spent on 'security' cameras each year (The West Australian 1994b:3). Public comments have focussed on the Burswood incident as' a gross misuse of the surveillance system' (Gibson 1994:3) as people have realised that there are no national privacy laws nor industry standards for the use of surveillance cameras. Opposition to security cameras is mounting as people recognise the extent of surveillance and its potential abuse. The Burswood Casino incident raises the question of whether surveillance cameras should be overt or covert, real or fake, and whether the surveillors should themselves be surveilled. Would people self-police their 'docile bodies' if they knew (or thought) that they were being gazed upon? If so there might well be a case for conspicuously locating false cameras together with notices warning of surveillance in operation. The other important issue is that of public and private. What constitutes public space and what constitutes private activity in a public space? In the case of the casino whose chief function is gaming, there is probably a case for surveillance of activity at gaming tables. Are women's toilets and changing rooms to be constituted as public spaces however? Is a private kiss behind a large plant an activity for public consumption? Boundaries between public and private have clearly been transgressed and reset by those in control without consultation. A kiss, a call of nature and a change of clothes have become public spectacles as women are menaced by the unseen gaze of the cameras. The'gaze' has thus become the remotely intimate, remotely revealing caress of threat.
Out in the Suburbs Davis (1992:244-50) tells of 'the security-driven logic of urban enclavisation' in Los Angeles where' defence of turf' takes on a new meaning and 'fortified mansions' and 'suburban bunkers' are protected by 'systems' packages including alarm hardware, monitoring, watch patrols, personal escorts and armed response as necessary. Similarly, in Hidden Valley, some 56 km north of Los Angeles, residents have installed a $70,000 (US) hydraulic device that
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shoots metre-long metal cylinders from underground into the bottom of unauthorised vehicles (Pertman 1994). Although Los Angeles is in a league of its own, some 30,000 suburban developments in other cities in the United States alone (Greinacher 1994; Pertman, 1994), in Britain (Planning Week 1994; Finlay 1994) and throughout the world, are following suit (Hillier and McManus 1994). In Perth, the erection of new, walled elite suburban developments as enclaves which penetrate or gentrify areas of existing lower or middle-class residences, represents a violation of those areas, forcing existing residents into a condition of other, excluded, outside of the macho bastions of capitalist power. Characterised by hilltop sites and special statements of design, these new exclusive residential ghettos commodify the search for personal and collective identity, 'the search for secure moorings in a shifting world' (Harvey 1989:302). In order to provide some form of certainty within contingency, place-identity and security become important issues. Space must be defended in order to stop crime before it can occur. Defensible space means space over which we have control. It also tends to mean observed space. The theory of defensible space (Newman 1972) suggests that where public space is open, well lit and surveillable by those inside the private spaces of homes or workplaces, crime rates decrease. 'Panoptic architecture is central to the defensible landscape in which private space is synonymous with surveillance and public space with movement' (Morgan 1993:394). The architecture of surveillance or the gaze includes the use of mirror glass to permit the unidirectional gaze of seeing without being seen, removing obstacles to observation (trees, shrubs etc), installing 'good' lighting and setting up security cameras in unobservable areas, to watch people who are unaware of being watched (Geason and Wilson 1989; Daley 1987). In Perth, in addition to incorporating some or all of the above features,
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The Bay is not all that is viewed
new suburban areas for the aspiring rich are often built on hilltop sites and with particular street and lot configurations which enable surveillance not only of those within the walls, but especially those without. A person's home really begins to resemble the proverbial castle, and it becomes easy to make comparisons with medieval counterparts. In a new lakeside (moated?) subdivision in Perth, Mumford's (1961:350) statement about a medieval town becomes realised today: 'when the portcullis was drawn and the town gates were locked at sundown, the city was sealed off from the outside world'. New suburban developments resemble fortress cities, complete with encompassing walls, restricted entry points with guard posts and privatised roadways. Access to one estate in South Perth is gained after passing closed-circuit television monitors at the walled and gated periphery and having the correctidentificationcard. As yet there are no 'neotraditional;' castle-like suburban developments in Perth, but time will tell. No matter that there were never any castles as such constructed in Western Australia, the so-called 'tradition' in neotraditional architectural design is predominantly invented (Til11993). There are striking oppositions in today's suburbia between those within the walls and those without, between us and them, seeing and seen, rich and poor, empowered or capacitated and disempowered/ incapacitated and between men and women. Such oppositions in contemporary society, however, exist less in the form of overt repression, but rather as avoidances, aversions and separations enacted by the privileged in relation to the oppressed. Kristeva (1982) offers us the useful concept of abjection; the feeling of loathing and disgust in encountering certain alien matter, the other. The abject, however, resides only just on the other side of the border, 'next to it, too close for comfort' (Young 1990:144). These abject others include blacks, unemployed, gays, disabled people etc. They are not so
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unlike the enclave inmates as to be obviously 'different'. Gazed upon outside through windows, mirror glass and by security cameras and guard dogs, and kept at bay by walls, fences and gates, the others intrude nevertheless into the privacy of the fortress' lounges via television and other media. Securely protected from the reality outside, residents gaze at their television sets, watching images and media representations of that same 'real' world. Whilst the gaze of the security apparatus threatens and menaces those outside the house, gazing at the television set often threatens and menaces those within: 'reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real' (Debord 1983:58). There is thus a kind of 'geometry' between the abject others, ostracised and excommunicated by the wealthy, and in the middle, the wealthy themselves, suffering from, but perhaps nevertheless, attracted by 'the vertigo of proximity, the hope of the renewal of ties, the house at dawn' (Serres in O'Farrell1989:69). The image of the house at dawn may represent both that liminal state between night and day, between sleeping and waking which electronic eyes never experience and the state between security and threat which human eyes perceive. Where are the women in these new estates? Many are in paid work; others are not. Virtually all are unseen except to emerge through wrought-iron gates or entry statement cocooned in the privacy of a hermetically sealed car. Yet it is traditionally women who surveil and are surveilled. Today, however, the slight movement of net curtains suggesting women's eyes covertly surveilling the street has been replaced by the automatic gaze of electronic eyes, symbolising the failure of trust that neighbours will perform the basic functions of community (McManus 1992; Richards, 1990). Perhaps the neighbours are too busy maintaining/ enhancing their own material lifestyle. The movement of women into the paid workforce, while often increasing individual independence and self-fulfilment, has left the material possessions of each household vulnerable. This trend is reinforced by possession of commodities such as the telephone, television, video recorder
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and high-tech interactive equipment which virtually eliminate the need to leave the home and also reduce knowledge of neighbours. Into this void come land developers with walled suburbs and security companies with surveillance products and services. The new residential areas in Perth, with their walled fortress-like appearances, thus offer exclusivity and inwardness, a private respite and h(e)aven from the other world outside of contingency, disruption and disadvantage. Safety has become 'security', commodified as a personal good defined by income, access to private 'protective services' and membership in some 'restricted suburb' (Davis 1992) where urban design, architecture and security apparatus have merged to ensure (and insure) personal insulation from 'unsavoury' groups and individuals. Houses are built both to see I gaze and be seen/ gazed upon. They make bold statements of status and identity, the manifestation of group values. Such statements are valueless unless they can be heard, or in this case, seen. Yet stories and experiences of burglaries, murders, rapes and so on have created a sense of vulnerability in residents' minds which has entrenched a fortress mentality. What must be gazed upon now are not symbols of wealth and prestige but rather symbols of security and protection. Those inside the house are able to gaze with unsleeping electronic eyes at the others outside, whilst remaining invisible from the human eyes in the street.
In Retrospect The idea of the gaze implies a god's eye view, an external vantage point from which the tangible world is replaced by a selection ofimages and from which all problems are solvable and all ills are curable. Space is appropriated by the gazer who, in surveilling, knows and controls. The gaze turns everyday life into'a theatrical spectacle' (Denzin 1991:8), whether it is the shopper gazing at montages of models in shop windows, the suburban resident watching television, or hidden video cameras, voyeuristically peeping at the comedies and tragedies played out in our cities. The boundaries between public and private are transgressed and reset. What were once public spaces (street, malls, arcades) where people projected their own private subject-selves become public subject-selves territories in privately 'owned' by the videocamera controllers. I have attempted to demonstrate, by surveying the spaces of the central business district and residential suburbs of Perth, that the gaze implies both looking and being looked at. The looking gaze may be powerful and controlling, but the gaze of the other presents a threat. We move between gazing and being gazed upon as we stroll through shopping malls or suburban streets. Our identity is contingent. We are at once and by turn, private and public, controlling and controlled, threatening and threatened, alive and (in still photographs) dead. Do my stories of Perth then represent 'just a gaze. An inspecting gaze' (Foucault in Gordon 1980:155) at the urban areas or are they something other? Whether from the control tower in Perth's central business district, the room in Burswood Casino or the lounge at home, people gaze like omniscient but invisible gods (Jay 1986). The gaze protects empires of capitalism. The gaze signifies control. It signifies power,
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'the benevolently sadistic gaze of a diffuse and anonymous power' (Jay 1986:191). We should not forget, however, that Foucault believed that wherever there is power, there is the possibility of resistance. Can the gaze of the other be stronger than that of the one? Can the gaze of the Medusa head petrify that of the Master culture? (Wilson 1988) Game (1991:74) points out that there is the potential for a substitution of a subject who sees for the object seen 'Seeing-the-other' becomes 'being-seen-by-the-other'. Can the gaze be resisted? The gaze objectifies, limits possibilities, denies freedom; there is seemingly no escape from its menace. Yet both Sartre and Lacan suggest a way out. Through sleep (inactivity or death?), love (community-spirited behaviour would obviate the need for surveillance?) or the mirror we can escape from the all-seeing gaze. Physically, the use of mirrors would turn the gaze of surveillance cameras back on themselves. Mentally, via self-reflection we can put ourselves in the place of the other in an attempt to control absence and understand presence. The space of the gaze is thus rearticulated as the locus of relationships (Pollock 1988). The idea of turning the gaze of surveillance back on the surveillors and reconceptualising the roles of surveillor and surveilled is explored by Berko (1992:72-3) who suggests that the Panopticon can be subverted. She gives examples of the videotaping of the arrest of Eric Johnson by the Sacramento police and of the bashing of Rodney King by the LAPD, to illustrate the 'democratisation of surveillance', the ability of everyday citizens to turn the camera on others and to show the results to the world. In so doing, the ideological framework of Panopticon-like surveillance breaks down as 'cameras expand their vision, (and) the viewers at home witness the other side of power, power out of control' (Berko 1992:78). Further instances of resistance and subversion can be found in the 'freedom' and jouissance (Lefebvre 1974) of youth 'performing' for the camera, whether it be that of the media or a personal video recording. Displays of gang warfare, rioting, joyriding or rapping and break dancing might well be as much a response to the camera's attention as to any deeper stimulus. Campbell's (1993) account of the 1991 urban 'riots' in Britain tells how personal video recordings of joy rider mates were passed round amongst young people in admiration. Campbell writes of the youth subculture of hand-brake turn joyriding which almost demands a police audience for its fulfilment. It is a subculture which has formed 'in the space between surveillance and the evasion of surveillance; it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched' (Hebdige 1988:35). The joyrider's self image becomes a function of being seen. In contrast to the idea of the surveilled as unwitting 'victims' of the Panopticon, resistance transforms the surveilled into performers who demand an audience to witness and certify their performance. 'Visibility ceases to be a trap. You want to be seen and it is precisely the possibility of not being noticed that is frightening' (Berko 1992:88). In a system which obviously expects us to act like criminals (why else, install so much surveillance technology?), some of us have turned crime into performance, whether it be waving or giving the v-sign into security cameras, joyriding before cam cording mates, or recording instances of police going over the top.
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But is there really a gaze, or is it only an hallucination? 'We see 'everything', yet it means less and less' (Wilson 1988:208). In a world devoid of values, voyeurism and surveillance are devoid of moral meanings. Is the gaze sane or insane, or both at once? In suburban areas such as St. John's Wood/Mt. Claremont where a walled estate of up-market residences has been constructed on land formerly belonging to the Graylands mental hospital, one ponders the meaning of walls and surveillance. Do such walled suburbs, replete with the technology of surveillance, represent an image of physical and ideological power, a neo-medieval fortress within which the drawbridge can be raised and surveilled freedom from contact with those outside maintained? Or rather, do they represent a neo-medieval ship of fools, in which the insane were herded onto a ship to sail the seas of Europe? We need also to publicly open the debate over the issue of public versus private. The examples above, all demonstrate the privatisation of the rhetoric of 'public safety', but in whose interests? We need to debate what constitutes a private activity in a public space (as in a casino) or a public activity in private space (rambling on a public right of way across private land?). These contestations should be made public and participatory. Furthermore, public space should be democratised. Users should be aware of who is gazing upon and surveilling whom, when, where and why. Surveillors, such as 'security' camera operators should be publicly accountable, i.e. they should be gazed upon. Democratic accountability should mean that knowledge is available to the public, and since knowledge is power, according to Foucault, resistance is possible. If the old idea of 'freedom of the city' is to regain its meaning, we need to rethink the apparatus of the gaze. We need to resubstitute human eyes for those of video-cameras, human interaction for electronic surveillance, to rediscover the meaning of community in neighbourliness and positive interaction. Utopian? Perhaps, but we shall see!
References Allen, M. (1993). 'Maps and explorations of Citiplace: Perth's micro-society of surveillance', in Watson, S. and Gibson, K. (eds) Postmodern Cities Conference Proceedings. Sydney: Sydney University, pp.1-16. Archer, S. (1994). quoted by Gibson, R. in 'Casino fails to block lewd video'. West Australian 5/7/94:3. Argyle, M. and Cook, M. (1976). Gaze and Mutual Gaze. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, W. (1973). Charles Baudelaire, Lyric poet in the era ofhigh capitalism. London: New Left Books. Berko, L. (1992). 'Surveying the surveilled: video, space and subjectivity'. Quarterly Review of Film and Video. 14(1-2):61-91. Bryson, N. (1988). 'The gaze in the expanded field', in Foster, H. (ed.) Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press, pp.87-108. Campbell, B. (1994). Goliath. London: Methuen. Caws, M. (1991). City Images. New York: Gordon and Breach. Channel7 TV, (1994). Real Life. Program screened on 4/7/94.
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Daley, P. (1987). The Neighbourhood Crime Prevention Handbook. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Davis, M. (1992). City of Quartz. New York: Vintage. de Certeau, M. (1984(. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Debord, G. (1983). Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Denzin, N. (1991). Images ofPostmodern Society. London: Sage. Ewald, F. (1992). 'A power without an exterior', in Armstrong, T. (ed.) Michel Foucault Philosopher, New York: Routledge, pp.179-175 Finlay, I. (1994). 'Britain's most sophisticated urban closed circuit television security system'. Beyond 2000. Channel Ten. TV programme screened 12th May. Foucault, M. (1973). The Birth of the Clinic, trans. Sheridan, A., London: Tavistock.
__ _, Discipline and Punish, trans. Sheridan, A., New York: Pantheon. Game, A. (1991). Undoing the Social. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Geason, S. and Wilson, P. (1989). Designing Out Crime. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. Gibson, R. (1994). 'Casino fails to block lewd video'. West Australian 5 July 1994, p.3 Gordon, C. (1980). Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester. Greinacher, U. (1994). 'The new reality: media technology and urban fortress'. Paper presented to Making Cities Livable Conference, San Francisco. Harvey, D. (1989). The Postmodern Condition. Oxford: Blackwell. Hebdige, D. (1988). Hiding in the Light. New York: Routledge. Hillier, J. and McManus, P. (1994). 'Pull up the drawbridge: fortress mentality in the suburbs', in Watson, S. and Gibson, K. (eds) Metropolitan Australia, Sydney: Pluto Press. Jay, M. 1986, 'In the empire of the gaze', in Hoy, D. (ed.) Foucault: a critical reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.175-204. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: an essay in abjection. New York: Colombia University Press. Lacan, J. (1978). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Sheridan, A. New York: W.W. Norton. Lefebvre, H. (1974). La Production de l'Espace, Paris: Anthropos. Lemert, C. and Gillan, G. (1982). Michel Foucault: Social Theory and Transgression, New York: Colombia University Press. McManus, P. (1992). This is where I live. Report presented to Feilmans Planning Consultants, Perth. Morgan, G. (1993). 'Acts of enclosure: crime and defensible space in contemporary cities', in Watson, S. and Gibson, K. (eds) Postmodern Cities Conference Proceedings, Sydney: Sydney University Press, pp.386-98. Morris, M. (1993). 'Things to do with shopping centres', in During, S. (ed.) The Cultural Studies Reader, London: Routledge, pp.295-319. Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History, London: Penguin. Newman, 0. (1972). Defensible Space: crime prevention through urban design. New York. O'Farrell, C. (1989). Foucault. Historian or Philosopher? London: Macmillan.
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Pertman,A. (1994). 'Accessdeniedinneighbourhoodofthe90s'. West Australian, Big Weekend. 2nd April. West Australian, Perth, WA. Pheby, K. (1988). Interventions. Washington: Maisonneuve Press. Planning Week (1994). 'RTPI voices concerns over 'fortress mentality". Planning Week, 13th January, p.4. Pollock, G. (1988). Vision and Difference. London: Routledge. Rabinow, P. (1984). The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin. Richards, L. (1990). Nobody's Home. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Sartre, J.P. (1956). Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, H. New York: Philosophical Library. __ _, (1960). 'The other and his look', in Treller,J. (ed.) To Freedom Condemned. New York: Philosophical Library. Sorensen, R. (1994). 'Why is becoming other always becoming leather?' Paper presented at Foucault The Legacy conference. QUT, Surfer's Paradise, 4-6 July. Till, K. (1993). 'Neotraditional towns and urban villages: the cultural production of a geography of otherness'. Environment and Planning D. Society and Space 11:70932. Watson, J. (1994). quoted by Fitzpatrick, C. in 'Tape 'rape by camera". West Australian, 5 July, p.3.
West Australian (1994a). 'Tape 'rape by camera". West Australian, 5th July, p.3. __ _, (1994b ). 'Sharp eye in the sky tracks you on the sly', 6th July. p.3. Wilson, E. (1988). Hallucinations. London: Radius. __ _, (1991). The Sphinx in the City. London: Virago. Winchester, H. (1992). 'The construction and deconstruction of women's roles in the urban landscape', in Anderson, K. and Gale, F. (eds). Inventing Places, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, pp.139-158. Wolff, J. (1985). 'The invisible flaneuse; women and the literature of modernity'. Theory, Culture and Society. 2(3):37-48. Young, I.M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
'Architectural Irregularities': Discourse and Technique in a Foucauldian History of the Picturesque Cottage
Jolin Macarthur In architectural history the uptake of Michel Foucault's work has been strangely limited. On the one hand we have an ignorant deployment which
limits Foucault to 'what he found out', and which misunderstands his historiography. This rather boring Foucault tells us what 'the body' or 'representation' really was so that architectural developments can be put in a context of 'ideas'. On the other hand, those architectural historians who do work faithfully in the manner of Foucault, generally find that there is nothing that corresponds to the 'architectural-ness' of such a history. And indeed some of the most interesting analyses of buildings using historical materials are being produced in 'Cultural Studies' not in 'Architecture'.l Therefore, wecouldsaythattheuptakeofFoucault'sworkhashad the effect of deepening the paradox of the practices of a history of a discipline, which must always define itself, in general, against a context, while listing a history of specific effects between the discipline and a general history. This should not be the case. Foucault's sophisticated concepts of context and of technique ought to take us beyond simple models of reflection between the history of an art form and a totalised history. Foucault asked: 'What in fact are medicine, grammar, or political economy? Are they merely a retrospective grouping by which the contemporary sciences deceive themselves as to their own past?'2 In this case Foucault answers no: although these disciplines do not have separate autonomous histories, they have the regularity and relation to the 'figure of man' pointed outinTheOrderofThings. Thesehuman'sciences',arenotpositivities:which is to say that they do not have epistemic structures which transcend their institutional settings. Nevertheless, the Human Sciences possess their own regime of counts as truth, and this is organised within a coherent discursive formation which can be the object of an historical inquiry. But could we claim the same level of epistemic and discursive structure for architecture? Foucault's challenge to the self-evidence of a disciplinary history still bites in architecture, where history generally means a rhetorical demonstration that architecture is something given, whole and coherent which can be revealed beneath the tribulations of its long career. Architecture is clearly not an historical discursive formation as were the Human Sciences. There has been, of course, a 'discourse' on architecture which is often falsely said to be a positive form of knowledge because it consists in texts which are on or about architecture. But in fact if one tries to read (for example) Kruft' sA History ofArchitectural Theory: from Vitruvius to the present, it becomes clear that these discourses on architecture are at a
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remove from their referents and, in their own series, are historically discontinuous on a short cycle. 3 One cannot read John Ruskin together with Le Corbusier (let alone Vitruvius) without being obliged to model the difference of both their discursive economies and their imbrication in a larger strata of discourse on the social. Knowing that they are both 'about' architecture is no help. Now, one might object that the problems of someone like Kruft inquiring into the 'discourse' on architecture are the result of a too narrow, linguistic, account of discourse. Indeed Foucault is sometimes invoked at this point to imagine that a unity of architecture could be grasped if we were to extent the concept of discourse to include spaces. It is demonstrable that the units of discourses (their statements, objects, and even concepts) are not limited to natural language. Jeffrey Minson gives a good example in considering the confessional as involving a specialised language, a training, a cosmology, furniture, and body posture. But it is much more difficult to imagine what a discursive formation would be if large parts of its structures and economies were not 'linguistic'. 4 Panopticism is an architectural concept, but what would it be to inquire into its forms of availability if Bentham had not named it and opened a metonymy between the device and concepts of governance in his pamphlet? A Foucauldian architectural historian might expect to have something to say about the relation of the Panopticon to built nineteenth century prisons and to neoclassicism. Perhaps something could be said to disrupt and redirect the notions of identity in form which are typical of architectural history discourse; but there is nothing to remark here except discontinuity. This seems to be a matter of fact as is demonstrated by Robert Adam's design of the Edinburgh Bridewell, where after a correspondence with Bentham, Adam managed to produce something rather like Ledoux's expressiveplanimetrics in a clear misunderstanding of discursive referents and techniques of the 'disciplinary regime'. 5 Of course there are many other things that an architectural historian could have told Foucault about the Panopticon, for example that its viewing structure is an inversion of the opera theatre, but what would this be a telling of? Such a history would be a list of misappropriated techniques; and failed conceptualisations. And this is (in a somewhat better light) is what I suppose that the history of architecture can be. Foucault insists that techniques cannot be described in some originating intention nor as the extension of ideas but rather as something like their property, which can be: constructed, but also appropriated, inherited, repolarised, and re-named. It is this line of thought which I intend to pursue as the operative question of an 'architectural' history. The history of the prison is that it is designed to reform, fails, and is reoriented as a point of inspection of the lower-classes. But what was the prison at the moment when it had failed and before it was reinvested by power? In Discipline and Punish the relation of techniques to discourse and power is unclear to the extent that 'technique' becomes metonymic of 'power', a mere qualifier which reminds us that we are to be disinterested in the question of the possession and interests of power. Discursive formations are where power and knowledge are organised, where techniques are named and what counts as their effectivity is calibrated. Yet if techniques have these relatively
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autonomous histories, this supposes that they are in some way non or prediscursive. At this point my argument is contentious, because one of the major lines of the development of Foucault's thought claims that there can be no non-discursive realm without reintroducing an ontology of language and large epistemological claims, which Foucault set out to avoid. Paul Hirst persuasively argues that one should consider buildings and architectural ideas as a form of statement and specify their relation to discursiveformations. 6 HirsttakesFoucaulttohaveshown thattherewasno general distinction between discourse and non-discourse, nor between language and non-linguistic statements in a discourse. Thus there could be no realm of architectural things defined in their materiality nor any a priori concept of architecture. What architecture is, or was, is specific to particular historical formations. The paradoxes of contextualising architecture then only arise through a failure to understand that the discipline of architecture is an historical and political contingency of little significance in itself. If we follow Hirst we would have to be sceptical about architecture, not about the conceptual density of buildings or their specific histories, but any analysis which had recourse to a History of Architecture would begin to look like a mythology, the production through endless examples of a supra-historical concept of architecture. Robert Adam's correspondence with Bentham would not be an issue for Hirst as it would be for an historian who began by assuming a unified architecture which could be accounted for against its context. Adam would be of only antiquarian interest, confirming Foucault's dictum that, the while the past is replete with documents and voices, the 'statements' which are discursively regular (and which thus allow us to understand historical structures) are rare. Hirst suggests that one should take up the style or manner of Foucault's practice in a commitment to specific analysis of statements, remembering their rarity and in regard to their formation, forgetting any a priori division of documents into texts, buildings, bodily practices, forms of order, or images. Contrary to Hirst I will argue that there are general forms of division of historical documents into discursive and non-discursive materials. My argument is not that this division is a priori, an issue of the material form of historical documents as linguistic or otherwise. Rather, I follow Gilles Deleuze'sschematisationofFoucaultinwhichadivisionofthingsarticulable and things visible is an empirically observable aspect of particular historical formations, related to their regime of truth effects and to the formation of techniques. I will first look at what it might mean to look at such a nondiscursive structure in a specific historical context and my example will be the picturesque architecture of the pattern books for ornamental cottages in the decades around 1800. Here I claim we can see something like the modern concept of architectural'planning' having a kind of sub-conceptual exercise immediately prior to its discursive structures. My point is that without supposing some trans-historical spirit or material proper to architecture we can nevertheless speak of it as a series, as Architecture, when there is evidence of such genealogy of techniques. HI have a conclusion then it is that techniques, their formation and uptake, which provide the operative question for any architectural history.
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Ornamental Cottages Eighteenth century European gardening relied heavily on ornamental buildings which directed views of the landscape. The buildings were mock temples and pavilions which recalled the setting of classical stories, or sometimes exotic visions of the Orient. Their role in any case was one of transporting the viewer who, seemingly fortuitously, would come upon the marvellous and the distant, offered up as a picture into which one could walk. Around 1800 rustic cottages suddenly became a genre of ornamental buildings, often used as gatehouses in the place of what might have been a triumphal arch a generation earlier. A conceit based on the reach and power of the architect and gardener's abilities with illusion, became instead a conceit based on the fine discrimination of the viewer. The visitor had to distinguish the cottage which ornamented the visual and ideational complex of the landscape from the disgusting hovels of the workers who generated its wealth. Not that the distinction was difficult to make at a simple level, but it represented a challenge to evince a competence which had to juggle a political iconography with the old doctrines of mimesis and the new aesthetics of disinterested judgment. This new game of genre interpolation in landscape park design is contemporary with events which put the agricultural workers' cottage near the centre of political debate. In 1796 Pitt's government launched a pre-emptive strike against civil disobedience in the countryside in the belief that the Revolution was about to cross the channel, and during the Napoleonic Wars there were more troops engaged in policing dissent in the countryside than there were fighting on the Continent.7The cottage was an important socioeconomic category because common rights (to pasture) were held to be attached to cottages, and tenancy in a cottage was grounds for a claim of settlement in a parish, and settlement was the basis of public assistance to the poor. Large land holders appropriated and enclosed the common lands and as grain prices inflated during the wars, both the schemes of public assistance to the poor and access to land for subsistence agriculture failed. The cottagers' response was to take over grain markets and insist on customary prices, to re-occupy enclosed land and to read Paine's Rights of Man in the village ale-house. The cottages which housed these people were mud walled, thatched roofed hovels without floors, or flues for the fires, and it is clear from contemporary commentators that a disgust at the living conditions of the poor complements disgust at their 'disloyalty'. The building of cottages as ornaments in landscape parks, sometimes for gardeners and workers in the park, but sometimes also for the family to 'retreat' to, seems almost inexplicably perverse. How could it be elegant to picnic in the simulacrum of a grimy tricolour? There is a sub-school of art history (following John Barrell) which has examined the land holders' taste for paintings of poor beggar girls, rabble in ale-houses, and occasionally labourers at work in the fields. s While the patterns of reference and the contemporaneity of the cultural forms and political changes are clear, the model of power is not. It is unclear whose interests are served by ornaments founded out of rural poverty, and Barrell loosely suggests that this ideology is a sort of psychic recursion, a sublimation of political animosity into the ambiguously charitable charms of the picturesque.
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If such an ideological relation were at work we might expect to find it explained in the theory of the picturesque, the new English aesthetic of the 1790s, identified with a taste for cottages and propounded most forcefully by Uvedale Price. 9 Price held that picturesqueness consisted in the intricacy and variety of form, and that an aspect of this was the irregularity of picturesque objects. By this Price means that a picturesque plantation or cottage forms no easy Gestalt, so that one view of it will be insufficient to imagine its totality, and for the moving observer it will create a number and variety of views. Price's picturesque is concerned with the classification of objects and finding a basis for public taste, rather than being, in the postKantian sense, an analytic of aesthetic judgement and the basis of critique. Thus the picturesque engages with art practises at the level of genre formation. If the beautiful is about formal qualities such as perfection, preciousness, and harmony, it is also the operative category of history painting. For Price, the formal qualities of the picturesque are a generalisation of the qualities of landscape and genre painting. Picturesque objects then tend to be close at hand, familiar and worn, in contrast to the elevated and distanced beautiful or sublime. The approbation 'picturesque cottage' is then quite tautological. The picturesque is the project of defining a lower genre of landscape and buildings which ornament it, and its formal categories are derived from the objects found there. 'Picturesqueness' thus answers a need for a concept of approbation for objects which had no intrinsic value, but also that more empirical problem of English land holders who could thus distinguish, for example, the free beauty of their horses from the familiar picturesqueness of their worker's houses. Price describes cottages and villages throughout the three volumes of his Essays on the Picturesque, and devotes a major essay to the question of a picturesque architecture. This essay is about what architects might learn from paintings and about generic categories, where Price reminds the reader of the few occasions for building in a grand manner and the many economical opportunities to exercise taste in rebuilding cottages. The picturesque is only half of the explanation of a taste in cottages, and it leaves many riddles. Price's intention is a prescription for landscape designers, but within the text his descriptions of picturesque things and experiences are always set while walking abroad in the prosaic countryside. AtthesametimeweknowthatPricedidnothimselffeelsafeoutsidethepale of his park at Foxely unless armed and on horseback. He was also the author of On the Defence ofProperty, a tract which proposed a mounted citizen militia who would make the countryside safe for strolling picturesque aesthetes who might otherwise be assaulted by the landless classes. 10 In regard to our immediate question of cottages, the particular issue which has been obscured is whether the picturesqueness of cottages is an ornament to a landscape design or to England as a whole, and whether when Price advises to improve them, he distinguishes a mimetic cottage from those lived in by workers. Price's split-mindedness prompts further investigation, and it is apparent that alongside picturesque discourse there is a contemporaneous discourse on agricultural reform, which also has a particular role for the cottage. Alongside the ornamental cottage there was a Reforming cottage, par
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exemplar the disciplinary regime, the thatched policing of families. 11 This reformist cottage also stands in a relation of succession with the fixing of the population by the massive forces of sovereign government, just as Foucault contrasts the French regulations for governing plague towns with the Panopticon. The reformers begin with a premise that agricultural unrest has primary cause in poor housing, in the fabric of cottages and in the behaviour of their inhabitants. The reformers saw the faults of the cottages around them not, in the first place, as a poverty of land, building materials and fuel, but as aspects of more extensive moral and intellectual failings of the cottagers: irreligion, readiness to revolt, adultery and incest, irrational attitudes to diet, resistance to modern agricultural practices, and a maddening ambition to set up as independent farmers. The reformed cottage was a complete regime which was designed as a domestic economy of women and children intersecting with the paid labour of the male 'cotter'. The cottage garden was sized so as to be incapable of completely supporting the family, there was to be no accommodation for taking apprentices so as to set up farming, and in the Communications to the Board of Agriculture there are long and fascinating debates about how the cottagers might have a cow for milk, but without profiting from breeding. Reformers promoted what was then a novel sexual division of labour with the idea that women's work in the cottage and garden and the raising of employable children would replace the dowry systems which had failed as rural poverty increased. The cottage came bundled with pamphlets which encouraged women to develop basic hygienic, dietary and child rearing expertise. The cottage provided tools for production, images of a subjectivity to attain, and finally in its upkeep and the productivity of its garden, a token improved or debased, which is visible to all. The reformers' cottage is then a clear example of Foucault's concept of a disciplinary regime. It is a device which is: 'positive', that is it draws out and rewards the cotters as well as their landlords; it constructs norms of behaviour through equipage as well as physical partition; and its economy is self-correcting, as well as being externallyinspectable. With the cottage we can see that much more directly (than in the case of the prison) Foucault's argument that the 'abstraction' of the body as labour power happens on the ground of its construction as a subjectivity.12 The picturesque and agricultural reforms are then two discursive formations where two sets of texts, sites and administrative constraints are overlaid historically, most obviously at the point where they address a single class of land holders who had an aesthetic and a managerial relation with the countryside. A mapping of both discourses would show that although they share few objects and concepts there are relations of complement and opposition which give us cause to think of them as a discursive constellation rather than being merely temporarily contingent. While reform and the picturesque have complementary views of the subjectivity of land holders, they each define an object, the cottage, completely differently, indeed obversely. The cottage is a significantly regular discursive shifter or hinge, and in recognising the two discursive objects at stake in it the land holder was constantly articulating the fortuitous pairing of landed wealth
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and taste. As Derrida would say: economimesis.13 Nowhere is the articulation of the double cottage object clearer than in the genre of architectural pattern books for cottage design, because the architects where unable to keep to this discursive rule. There were some 90 pattern books published between 1780 and 1830, largely by young architects advertising their talents and desperate to have their designs determined by both the picturesque and agricultural reform. 14 The books typically begin with an essay followed by a set of designs. It is rare to see much competence in the handling of politico-aesthetic referents, and this is not explained by the cross determinations of any formalised discourse on Architecture. If the pattern book text advertises a national imperative to improve the housing of agricultural labourers, the designs are likely to have too many or too few bedrooms; if Price is quoted it is quite possible that the designs will be the prim Georgian style he detested. But most significantly most of the pattern books set out their designs in a range of sizes, and as many start with labourers' cottages and work up through ornamental buildings to villas for the gentry in a cottage style, this creates all sorts of unwanted politicoaesthetic inferences. However, despite the failure and incoherence of pattern book discourse, the pattern books are very significant historically. They are the mosttangible documents of the emergence of architectural planning, which will become one of the fundamental techniques of modern societies. What the pattern book architects saw, but were unable to articulate, was that the picturesque form of complex roof shapes was the consequence of non-symmetrical plan forms, and further, the ability to begin planning a building from a functionalist analysis of room interrelations tended to produce non-symmetrical plans. The two discursive cottages are thus joined not only in that they have the same referents but in that they suppose the same technique in the strategy for their proliferation. The architects call this technique 'irregularity', which has a topicality because of Price's use of it to describe the qualities of picturesque objects. While for Price irregularity is very abstract, he also directed architects' attention to the ancient manor houses, with their centuries of accretions, and the naively built peasant's cottages which did have irregular, asymmetrical plan forms. Prior to this, the symmetry of the plan is the principle by which architecture could be distinguished from vernacular building, a rambling accretion of parts which is 'unclosed' by an idea or intention of an architect. John Nash and Humphry Repton probably designed the first irregularly plarmed architectural work since the Renaissance at Luscombe, Devon, in 1799.15 They wanted the primary rooms on the ground floor oriented to particular views at ninety degrees to one another. A symmetrical plan was therefore implausible because of the dissymmetry of the views, and impossible because the service rooms of the building, which would normally be on the ground or in a half-basement, had to be on the same level as the main apartments. Irregularity might have begun as an imitation of medieval styles, but it allowed very specific room relation, ease of servicing, and an ability to deal with additions and change. With the vantage point of history we can see a definite and fundamentally modern principle emerging whereby
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the 'planning' has two axes. The first is a concern with the dialogue and mutual definition of spaces inside and outside the building, and the second is the use of a functionalist analysis of room requirements, interrelation, and servicing. But there was no contemporary discussion of the planning principles which architects such as Nash, Soane, and the better pattern book architects, clearly must have 'understood' at some level. The only documented discussion of these matters before 1850 is in the cottage pattern books and there 'irregularity' is discussed in a fractured and confused way, not as a technical device, but as to how it might be semantically commensurate with the twin discourses on the picturesque and agricultural reform. The dislocation of discursive referents and architectural technique can be seen most clearly in the books of Malton and Elsam. In 1797 James Malton published British Cottage Architecture which argues for an irregular plan form from Price's concept of the visual complexity and directionality of picturesque objects, but without stating any of the other advantages of irregular planning. 16 He also argues that the associations of irregularity are entirely scenic and not social and that the same cottage style is applicable to labourers and gentlemen's houses. The designs also include a mixture of rustic materials and some faked decay. They are quite charming and not a world away from any overtly picturesque cottages builtin England up to the present day. Malton is then attacked in a rival pattern books. Richard Elsam accuses Malton of an affront to taste by housing the gentry in buildings which look like peasant's hovels. 17 For Elsam this implies a loss of signifying functions for architecture. Malton, taken aback by the criticism quickly produced another book of extreme symmetrical designs in non-rustic materials.18 Yet this second book, Designs, is typical of many of the pattern books in that the regular designs are not symmetrical in the full sense of the word. For classical architects symmetry is an overall sense of propriety, the immanence of ordo in every consideration, but in the pattern books uniformity, is seldom to do with balance and harmony of this sort, and as in Malton's triangular designs, the reduction of the concept of symmetry to plan geometry. The villa is the preferred vehicle of architects timid of the political connotations of cottage, as Malton is in his second book, and gentlemen's cottages and villas provide architects with a particular freedom to manipulate form. The villa is the complement to the cottage in that it is about the formation of bourgeois subjectivity, and is related to ideas of privacy and companionable marriage. While the cotter's wife will be given a new technical role in domestic economy, the gentlewoman, jaded and made artificial by the mechanics of entertaining and being received in the full light of society, will retire temporarily to a shady cottage where she will find herself in long walks, charitable acts and novel reading. Architects like Malton make much of these images to justify stretching the cottage type up the social range, but it also gives them a particular freedom in that such buildings will not require extensive service areas, which in country houses used for entertaining, typically equalled the public rooms in area. Buildings with peculiar symmetries such as the triangular or circular were extremely
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difficult to achieve with large service areas. So while the cottage opened on one hand to the irregular and free planning which could be learnt from accretionary buildings, it also opened symmetrical figures in a quite novel way. Now, rather than the manifestation of an ideal, they represented a demanding task over which the architect could demonstrate the bravura of producing furnishable rooms out of a triangular plan. We are now ready to say that the dislocated citation of discourses of the social and aesthetic by architects actually functions to open a space in which the technique of planning will emerge. This is perhaps clearest in the work of Joseph Gandy the architect who is the most laconic and negligent of discursive referents and the most skilled and focused on planning techniques.19 Gandy sets out to provide a systematic exploration of plan figures in apparent ignorance of the controversy as to their semantics. These range from bilateral symmetry, polarised single axis symmetry, broken symmetry, and free asymmetry. In one design he shows how four dwellings of the same floor area could be combined together to form a single asymmetrical building, and then presents another in which four dwellings of a progressive range of size and room number could be perversely planned as a building which would have the appearance of bilateral symmetry. This display of purposiveness can have no actual purpose except to advertise a skill in planning, newly differentiated from architecture as such. We know that subsequent to this period the ability of architects to 'plan' involves a whole range of specialised considerations; of plot ratio, ratio of gross to net floor area, the articulation of structure, solving complex requirements for the interrelation of spaces, and directing the sequence of attention of users of the building. Each of these is a teachable skill involving the use of particular types of drawing and calculation. Such particular tasks have been largely unintelligible to architects of the period, but they are already preparing the conceptual space of such activities, a space of meta-technics, in which architecture could understand itself in its 'applicability' and in relation to other emerging techniques of the social. After 1810 'irregularity' is gradually dragged away from its politicodiscursive referents through the invention of the asymmetrical 'rural Italian' style. The issues which Malton had raised return with the Old English cottage style in the 1830s by which time the political associations had changed. In 1850s Robert Kerr, an expert on the planning and management of country houses, addressed the RIBA and claimed that the poor preferred one room dwellings and that the differentiation of activities and access which planning could achieve was best associated with the more developed society of the middle and upper classes. 20 He was apparently shouted down because by then planning had a discursive regularity, it answered to a concept of technique, and one which was identified not with social classes but with the specific and definitive expertise of architects. Talking ofplanimetrics in relation to social class and generic height, which the pattern-book architects had begun in a spluttering way, was by 1850 not a possible form of statement in architectural discourse.
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Discourse and Technique Through my exposition I have opposed discourse and architectural technique and attempted to take seriously the failure of the pattern book architects to engage in these two discursive formations. In doing this I have followed Gilles Deleuze's exposition and development ofFoucault's historical method. 'What The Archaeology recognised but still only designated negatively, as non-discursive environments, is given its positive form in Discipline and Punish, a form that haunted the whole of Foucault's work: the form of the visible, as opposed to the form of whatever can be articulated' ,21 Foucault has shown us, according to Deleuze, that major shifts in the history of thought have relied on structuring a relation between what is visible and what is sayable. Indeed knowledge is defined by the combinations of visible and articulable that are unique to each stratum or historical formation',22 NowthisrunsdirectlyagainsttheadviceofPaulHirstwhichwouldhaveme consider 'irregularity' as some sort of discursive object or concept, and which I think would result in a description where the cottage pattern books could only be a sort of anomaly. If Deleuze is correct, then this would explain the great appetite which Cultural Studies seems to have for the built environment. These 'general historians' imagined by Foucault have interesting things to say about the buildings which they come across because they have begun with what can be 'said'; institutions and practices of governmentality which necessarily produce diagrams of relations between visibilities, normalised behaviour and discourse at the moment when they build. By contrast, analyses of architecture which begin with questions of 'visibilities' like irregular planning, will always describe an architecture which is either inadequately engaged in discourse and concrete historical formations, or, is completely determined by them, like the reformed housing of the 1850s where there is nothing 'architectural' to look at, only the determination of building by a reformist discourse. Whatever interconnections and dependencies there are will always be more or less like the cottage pattern books, the evidence not of a system of the dispersal of statements in which architecture is engaged, but the splatter of an impact as discourse shoots through the tissue of space. Hirst's advice is so firm on the discursive nature of architecture because he follows Brown and Cousins' criticism of The Archaeology which is; that by inadequately differentiating his concept of the statement from linguistic units, and discourse from language, Foucault inadvertently allows that there might be a 'real' which discursive formations document more or less adequately. 23 Thus the description of discursive formations in their own terms, as monuments, has collapsed into something like a relativist epistemology. Brown and Cousins therefore insist that there are no unified realms of discursivity and the 'non-discursive', merely things (whether they are words, buildings or administrative procedures) which either do or do not form statements in a particular discursive formation. The discursivity of certain buildings is then one proof of the pudding that discourse is the formation and organisation of statements rather than something wrought out of linguistic material.
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Deleuze's account of Foucault is useful because he has a much more commonsensical understanding of discourse as a linguistic organisation, but within a complex structure which accounts for most of the methodological problems which Brown and Cousins raise, if not their attempt to weaken Foucault's epistemological claims. Deleuze is claiming that the opposition of visible and articulable forms is general and more extensive than any discursive formation. It swings around the putative 'natures' of language and visibilities, but it is an historically concrete speculation on the capacities of these 'natures'. Thus we cannot simply divide historical objects into discourses and visibilities on the basis of their linguistic content or form. Some parts of buildings might be in the realm of what is articulable, others form mechanisms of visibility; and this relation is in flux, because although the articulable level has a primacy and acts to determine the visible, each side enacts a strategy of capture. Thus the picturesque suddenly determined that humble buildings could be seen as architecture, and the pattern book architects attempted, and failed, to interject a concept of 'irregularity' into aesthetic discourse. To name and mark something as non-discursive, in the sense of being positively a field of visibility, is not then an issue of how or from what statements and visibilities are formed, but an issue of what Foucault calls discursive strategies. For Deleuze what he calls 'historical formations' are 'concrete machines' which deploy the two parts of visible and articulable forms, but they are also the successors to more' abstract machines' which are their 'immanent cause'. Abstract machines are abstract in that they are a diagram of the entire social field, and in that they do not distinguish between discourse and nondiscourse. Disciplinarity is such an abstract machine, which, in a non-place, arranges the whole of the social. But concrete disciplinary regimes arrange particular populations and whether they do so by buildings, statistical data, legal codes or police, they can be described in the way in which they form and intersect fields of discursivity and visibility. Historically, the emergence of concrete machines and the production of social effects can be observed in their reaching a threshold of technicity at which point they enact this division. It follows that we cannot examine the adequacy of a technique to some idea of it, because these things stand either side of an historical threshold. It also follows that although techniques can become the object and concepts of discourse, they are, in the first place, non- or pre-discursive. Which is why I would want to say that the cottage pattern books are such a threshold which immediately precedes the nineteenth century organisation of what can be seen, said and planned for in urban form, domesticity as the formation of self, and the house as gender marked equipment. In the case of the cottages, it is clear that architectural things form discursive statements. Bread ovens are an object of discourse as much as incest, and the concept of what acts on incest is access arrangements between rooms as much as it is religious instruction. The drawing of plans is a regular form of'enunciation', alongside the calculation of the cottage economy, and eulogies to the usefulness, loyalty and virtue of independent cottagers. We could do a similar mapping of the picturesque which shows that an aspect of their pairing is a similar level of the engagement of architecture into
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discursive economies. But the corpus of cottage pattern books is not regular with either of these, nor does it constitute a discursive formation of its own, nor is it part of a delimited architectural discourse. Its relation is that it is making something with the inadequate name 'irregularity'; a word which barely makes sense as an architectural term, is meaningless in reformist discourse, and has a different meaning in picturesque discourse. According to Foucault, one of the principles of 'semio-technique' was that techniques of punishment required 'sufficient ideality' and it is something like this that marks the failure of an architectural discourse on the cottage to rise and intersect with those on agricultural reform and the picturesque. The irregularity of cottage architecture had insufficient ideality. Within the discourses it was quite simple to 'think' an admiration for complex roof forms, or the separation of children from parents in tiny buildings, but nowhere is there a place to see that these aesthetic and disciplinary projects are unknowingly dependent on a single technical innovation, a task, as it were, spat out of discourse, unnamed. What is, would it be, to generalise from my case study and Deleuze's rather Baroque theory? What would it mean to start with technique? Provenance, yes, objectification in discourse, certainly, place in a strata of visibilities, yes, although it is not entirely clear what this would be. 24 But these are historical questions and an archaeology of techniques would require the terms of a positive description. Reading Deleuze (and Adorno )25 alongside the analysis of 'irregularity' has led me to think of it this way; that technical assemblages construct sets of materials, and in a way which partners what Foucault calls regimes of truth. Discursive formations construct truth regimes, bounded areas of thought where the true I false distinctionrunsitswrit,andfromwhichthingsareexcludedorincludedasamatter of historical struggle. Deleuze describes these regimes in terms of a well determined primacy in the 'two-part machine' of discourse over visibilities. Truth is enacted in the project of 'speaking and seeing at the same time .. ', in the act of determining vision within a discursive framework, ' .. although we do not speak what we see, or see what we speak'. 26 This problematisation crosses an epistemological threshold when a kind of viewing is determined to be the concept of a science, when the thing viewed is 'objectified'. But perhaps it crosses a threshold of technicity when a device emerges in search of its appropriate material. The cottage problem does something like this: the actual rural cottages that were first 'seen' in the late eighteenth century and displayed in a variety of architectural dioramas, produce the concept that housing is the index and means of social integration in later urban hygienicism, and also the polarity by which the object of the rising middle classes will be detached and sub-urban housing. But there is a stage prior to this, as I have shown, the techniques of planning which all of this assumes had emerged decades earlier and where given a sub-conceptual exercise. Therefore I have supposed that planning was a technique which posited a materiality for itself, 'the stuff arranged by the plan', of which it had a kind of non-conceptual knowledge. The relation of technique and material is rational but non-conceptual; from the point of view of the architects it is logical that picturesque outline and domestic economy are equally formed
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by the plan, but at the time this could not be conceptualised. This is not to say that it could not be thought by individuals, but that it could not be taken up in discourse and given a regularised usage. To do so would have been unstrategic as it would have put into identity what was supposed to be opposed: the paired discursive economies of agricultural reform and the picturesque. The question of 'irregularity' is, then, such a short lived 'regime of materiality' which will later be offered up as a specific form of exteriority on which some concepts of class, the family and urban form will be erected. Thus in the case of the frivolous ornamental cottage, knowledge is prefigured in technique, and discourse forms around these architectural irregularities.
1
See Ian Hunter (1994). Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, bureaucracy, criticism, St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, and Tony Bennet (1995). The Birth of the Museum, London and New York: Routledge.
2
Michel Foucault (1972). The Archaeology ofKnowledge: and the discourse on language, New York: Pantheon, p.31.
3
Hanno-Walter Kruft (1994). A History ofArchitectural Theory: from Vitruvius to the present, Princeton University Press.
4
Jeffrey Minson (1985). Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics, London: Macmillan, p.123, and chapter 6 'Genealogy and Archaeology' passim.
5
See Robin Evans (1982). The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture 17501840, Cambridge University Press, especially chapter 10 'Architecture limited and unlimited' which raises issues concerning technique co-extensive with those I raise about the architecture of ornamental cottages.
6
Paul Hirst, 'Foucault and Architecture', first published in Local Consumption, Sydney, Occasional Paper 4; also as 'Power /Knowledge- Constructed Space and the Subject' in Power and Knowledge: anthropological and sociological approaches ... a conference held at the University of St. Andrews in Dec. 1982 R. Pardon (ed.) Scottish Academic Press, 1985; and most recently in AA Files, 26, 1993.
7
My account of agrarian history is based on J.L. and B. Hammond (1911). The Village Labourer, Longmans, London: Green and Co., G.E. Fussell (1949). The English Rural Labourer, London: Batchworth, E.P. Thompson (1963). The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin, K. Snell (1985). Annals of the Labouring Poor, Cambridge University Press.
8 John Barrell (1972). The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place; an approach to the poetry ofJohn Clare, Cambridge, and The Dark Side of the Landscape; the Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840, Cambridge University Press, 1980, and more recently Ann Birmingham (1986). Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860, California University Press. 9
Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, London: Mawman, [Westmead: Gregg Int. facsimile], 1810, [1971]. On the theory of the Picturesque see Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, Frank Cass and Co., London, 1967, and W. J. Hipple (1957). The Beautiful, The Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth Century British Aesthetic Theory, Carbondale: Sth lllinois University Press.
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10 Uvedale Price (1797). Thoughts on the Defense ofProperty, addressed to the County of Hereford, London. 11 An influential text of the time is: Communications to the Board of Agriculture; on subjects relative to the husbandry and internal improvement ofthe country, Geo. Nicol, London, 1797. Also see Society for bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (1800) Information for Cottagers, London. 12 Michel Foucault (1979). Discipline and Punish, NY: Vintage, p.25. 'It is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body' 13 Jacques Derrida (1981). 'Economimesis', Diacritics, June, pp.2-25. 14 Michael McMordie (1975). 'Picturesque Pattern Books and pre-Victorian designers', Architectural History, 18:42-59. Also see John Archer (1989). The Literature of British Domestic Architecture 1715-1842, MIT. I am currently doing research on the architecture of these books, and have previously published (1989) 'The Picturesque Cottage: Genre and Technique', Southern Review, 22(3)301-314. 15 This is not to say that previously buildings were always symmetrical but that their asymmetries were to do with the contingencies of siting and the accretion of symmetrically considered parts. This is most obvious when looking through the folios of mid-eighteenth century architects. For example J. Paine was capable of skilful use of the irregularities of a city site through the recovery of divergent angles within the poche of the regular plan, yet he always develops a full symmetry when the site is less constrained, and country houses and ornamental buildings in particular become an exercise in axiality and unfolding. R. Adam drew irregular castles, but as views and in the mode of caprice, while his buildings on this theme are symmetrical. 16 James Malton (1797). An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to
perpetuate on principle, that peculiar mode of building which was originally the work of chance, London. 17 Richard Elsam (1803). An Essay on Rural Architecture... Being an Attempt, also, to refute, by analogy, ... Mr. J. Malton's Essay, ... London. Also attacking Malton is John Plaw (1800). Sketches for Country Houses, Villas, and Rural Dwellings ... Also some Designs for Cottages, London. 18 James Malton (1802). A Collection of Design for Rural Retreats, as Villas, Principally in the Gothic and Castle Styles of Architecture, J. and T. Carpenter, London. 19 Joseph Michael Gandy (1806). Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms, and other Rural
Buildings, London, 1805, The Rural Architect; consisting ofvarious designs for Country Buildings, London. 20 Robert Kerr (1866-7). 'On the problem of providing dwellings for the poor in Towns',RIBA Transactions,1stSeries, vol. XVII,1866-7, pp.39-59. Sourced through Robin Evan's discussion of these issues in (1979) 'Rookeries and Model Dwellings: English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space', AAQ, 10:1:2435. 21 Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Foucault, Minnesota University Press, p.32 22 Ibid, p.51 23 Beverley Brown and Mark Cousins (1980). 'The Linguistic Fault: the case of Foucault's Archaeology', Economy and Society, 9(3):251-78.
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24 There is now a minor literature on 'scopic regimes' which is a new historicist history of art which begins from a somewhat Foucauldian position but does not refer to Deleuze's methodological inventions. See the works of N. Bryson, J. Crary, M. Jay. 25 Deleuze's schematised Foucault is actually quite close to Adorno's aesthetics on the issue of technique and discursive- non-discursive relations, if not on the nature of history and its dialectical mechanisms. Adorno holds that the critical value of artworks lies in their being non-discursive forms of knowledge, and, through a complex set of arguments, the privileged agents to oppose reification, the distortion of discursive forms of knowledge. Technique is a constitutive part of art and of its non-discursivity because it is 'rational but not conceptual... in addition to providing the criterion for the 'logic' of art works, technique also determines when and where logic has to be suspended' (Aesthetic Theory, p.304). Adorno also holds that material (space, tonality,line) are not given a priori to an art form but are formed in society and over history. Good art, which is to say critical art, locates historically advanced artistic materials, and understands them as a constraint on technical development. For instance, modern composers properly avoid the diminished seventh (a question oftechnique) because tonality (a musical material) was out of date by the beginning of the twentieth century. Similarly Wagner's operas achieve a certain ambivalent critical resonance because although at a conceptual and mimetic level they are ideological and false, at a technical level they truly locate and exercise the advanced musical material of their period. (T. W. Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, RKP also see LambertZuidervaart (1991). Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion MIT.) Now it is relatively simple to remove the Marxist epistemology from under this by saying that the artistic materials and their histories are not singular and the knowledge of them which technique exercises is not a non-conceptual knowledge of historicity as such. We could thus capture Adorno's schema within Deleuze's historical formations. 26 Deleuze, 1986, p.67.
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j'oucau{t: 'IFte Legacy //)
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1. Cottage design typical of treatises on agricultural reform. Robert Beeston, "Small Cottages" from his "On Cottages" pp.103-117 of Communications to the Board of Agriculture; on subjects relative to the husbandry and internal improvement of the country, Geo. Nicol, London, Vol1, 1797. The author wishes to acknowledge Cambridge University Library who hold the books in which the following illustrations appear.
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2. James Malton's architectural version of an agricultural worker's cottage, Plate 6, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on principle, that peculiar mode of building which was originally the work of chance, London, 1979.
3. James Malton's contentious idea of designing villas for 'retired' gentry in a manner which is not differentiated from vernacular farm houses, Plate 9, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on principle, that peculiar mode of building which was originally the work of chance, London, 1979.
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4. Joseph Michael Gandy, four cottages of the same size grouped as an irregular building. The Rural Architect; consisting of various designs for Country Buildings, London, 1806.
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5. Joseph Michael Gandy, four cottages of different sizes grouped as a regular or symmertrical building. The Rural Architect; consisting of various designs for Country Buildings, London, 1806.
Part Four Philosophy
The Ethics of Singularity in an Era of Complete Nihilism
In his last works Michel Foucault began to examine ethics - humans as
ethical beings instead of products of knowledge and power. This shift, in my opinion, can be considered as an effort to search for such a human power or form which would be able to resist the modern form of subordination which he called biopower, and its dangers which he had so well described previously. His critical work took a positive turn in the end. The question was no longer, how power produces us as subjects, but, how can we 'create ourselves as a work of art' (Foucault 1983:237).
A history of morals For a long time Western ethics and politics were based on the transcendent law of God. This law was transcendent because it was not made by human beings; it had a divine origin. It got its authority outside of the community. ImmanuelKantwasamongthefirstphilosopherstounderstandthathuman beings cannot rely on laws made from without. According to Kant, the laws should be made from within, by the pure reason of human beings. Pure reason alone, says Kant, 'gives (to man) a universal law, which we call the moral law' (Kant 1976:143). But in so far as reason itself, in the case of Kant, remained the ultimate faculty of judging, it took the place of God. Reason itself became transcendent. That is why, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, Kant's critiques were only forms of justification: 'Kant's success', says Nietzsche, 'is merely a theologian's success' (Nietzsche 1972, aphorism 10). One cannot just put God to death, one must also destroy his place. The moral revolution had to be brought to its end. One also has to destroy, as Nietzsche claims, the divine essences like Reason, Truth and Goodness, Telos or Right which tried to occupy the place of a dead God. This is because, according to Nietzsche, morals should not be regarded from the point of view of transcendence, but from the perspective of immanence, from the perspective of life. This is exactly what the human sciences, these modern messengers of the apolitical from medicine to biology and sociology (from Bichat to Cuvier and from Galton to Spencer) have always wanted to say. However, while Nietzsche used life as a metaphor, or as a joke, referring to the deceptive nature of being ('life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error' (Nietzsche 1967a:23)) the human sciences have taken life seriously. For these sciences, life is not the multiplicity of the forms of life as they appear, but a united multiplicity created by immanent norms of life. The human sciences, from biology to sociology, have rejected transcendence and have offered a new kind of moral principle, which is not transcendent, but, as the modern scientific outlook of the world requires, purely immanent (or at least they claim so). According to these, life
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is the only legislator and the only laws are the immanent norms of social and biological life. Thus, it is evident that the order of norms of life is not the willed order of human beings (it is not political), but, as the human sciences assert, the necessary order of things. It is the order which rises from the regularities of the social life, from its probable variations and its forecasted processes. In this respect, the human sciences are very different from the political theories of the eighteenth century. The human sciences do not give rational right to nature (as natural right theories), on the contrary, they give the natural norm to the ratio, to the reason and will. (In the era of the human sciences, human intelligence or reason is not much more than the IQ test indicates.) Michel Foucault was a severe critic of the human sciences and the immanent norms of life. He described carefully how these norms operate in practice, how these norms are not simply harmless standards by which we comprehend man and his world, but means of power which are maintained and sustained by normalising technologies. But how does the power of the norm operate? First of all, the norm of the modern human sciences is not a boundary between two distinct areas. It is not a juridical law which separates good and bad making an abyss between allowed and forbidden, between inside and outside: 'The law always refers to the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility' (Foucault 1990a:144). This does not imply, however, that the law itself is always necessarily juridical, an expression of a sovereign's power, for it can also be normative. Thus, the opposition is not between the law and the norm but rather between the juridical and the normative. Unlike the juridicallaw, the norm knows no outside, as Fran~ois Ewald has pointed out. Nothing is strange to the norm, because the stranger (the dwarf or the giant), is not the Other, but a variation of the Same (Ewald 1992:171-4). The stranger is not the opposite of the norm, but an extreme case of it. Thus, the limit of norm is absolute. That is why Foucault saw the effort of liberation as useless and even inconvenient. The norm excludes liberation, because to liberate is to throw away the limits, but the limit of the norm is always supple - absolutely supple. It extends itself to the final point of its application. That is also why it is not open to discussion. The norm is beyond all ethics and politics- it is their a priori. The power of the norm, its capacity to swallow everything it touches, lies in the modern concept of life. Unlike us, who have only one concept to signify life, the Greeks had two: zoon signified life common to all living beings, and bios signified a form or manner of life which was characteristic to each individual being or group. The basic question about life was not what is life in general, but which one. Modern languages forgot this fundamental distinction and one, and only one, noun was substituted for them both. The result of this substitution was that life in its nakedness entered into the political field: the new foundation of politics, its new nomos, was the production of life. The most peculiar feature of modern politics is not, in other words, the sovereignty of the state nor any form of democracy but the fact that its main
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target is the naked life of human species. For millennia the pure fact of life was excluded from politics. In modern society, however, natural life is put at the heart of the polis. For the Greeks, man was primarily a political animal, zoon politikon, whose life had a specific form, bios politikos. Now man is primarily an animal whose politics, as Foucault writes, 'places his existence as a living being in question' (Foucault 1990a:143). This fusion of politics and life in the modern world gave birth to a new form of power which Foucault calls biopower (bio-pouvoir). This power does not have a form of law or prohibition nor does it deal the legal subjects. It is invested - with the help of an immanent norm - in the pure biological existence of men: it regulates individual bodies and whole populations. If 'the people' is still claimed to be the politically sovereign subject in the era of modernity, this is because this 'people' is always, at the same time, the ordinary people, les miserables whose life should be governed by the administrative apparatuses at the level of its 'life processes' as Hannah Arendt puts it (see Arendt 1958:33-6). The people becomes a population. Biopower does not operate through the citizens and the people, it is invested, instead, in their real material conditions of existence. It is power which faces naked life without the mediation of forms of life. This power which fosters life for the sake of the strength of the nation, race or mankind, is also, without exception, a good companion of the modern thanatopolitics, the politics of massacre: 'Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilised for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity; massacres have become vital' (Foucault 1990a:137). Even if the name of Auschwitz brings to our minds the most absolute space of biopower ever come true, concentration camps are not the only proof of the vitality of massacres. Hiroshima and all modern wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Bosnia)- in which the winning of combats as a purpose of war is replaced by the calculated slaughter of civilians - point towards this political rule of modernity. Foucault's main point about the immanence of the norm of life is that its norm is not, in the last analysis, immanent at all. Georges Canguilhem has made this explicit too: 'to set a norm, to normalise, is to impose a requirement on an existence' (1991:239). Life, as such does not know norms, only human beings know them, and norms are known by human beings, because they are invented by them. That is why norms are transcendent. However, one has to consider that the immanent norm of life is not a transcendence understood as eternal or constant (even if it is 'a root of all existence', as Foucault writes) but a historical and changing root, in other words, a sort of quasi-transcendent element (Foucault 1989:278). The norm is quasi-transcendent, because it does not even try to occupy the transcendent place left by the overthrown God. The power of the norm lies precisely in thatithasnoplaceatall-rather,itis a pure non-place. The norm spreads all around. It is now-here and no-where. The norm is the invisible sovereign. But what could immanence or life be without the transcendent law or the immanent norm? What could life be as pure immanence? According to JeanLuc Nancy absolute immanence, life without transcendence, signifies fusional
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communion which has no other logic than that of suicide or death (Nancy 1991:11-12). (Though this does not mean that Nancy wants to erect a new object or expose a new sacrifice, because for him transcendence signifies nothing else than resistance to immanence (Nancy 1991:35).) According to Gilles Deleuze, however, it is a mistake to suppose that transcendence would save us from the night of immanence, from death and suicide. Rather it is this immanence and its infinite movements, its pure speeds and slownesses, where we should search for our power to exist. In this immanence, 'there are no longer any forms of developments of forms;nor are there subjects or the formations of subjects. There is no structure, any more than there is genesis. There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, molecules and particles of all kinds' (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:266). The absoluteness of immanence does not signify that everything would be united in the mysterious suicidal community; rather, according to Deleuze, thinking of immanence without transcendence means thinking pure multiplicity without unity. (However, the transcendence which, according to Nancy, saves us from the absolute immanence and which he calls singularity, is not far away from Deleuze's concept of individuation of which immanence in fact is' composed'. (On the relation between things and immanence see Deleuze and Guattari 1991:148)). Nietzsche gives this immanence another name. For him, pure immanence, life without law or the norm, is nihilism. But what kind of nihilism? Nietzsche distinguished at least two kinds of nihilism; transcendent and negative, and immanent and reactive. The common denominator for both these forms of nihilism is that they depreciate life: life is something unreal for them. Thus, on the one hand we have a form of nihilism which devaluates life in the name of higher values, such as God, Truth or the Good. On the other hand we have a form of nihilism which devaluates these higher values themselves. As the former denies life for the sake of a better life (for the sake of the universal love of the Christian, or for the sake of absolute freedom of the Revolutionary) the latter denies it because nothing is true, nothing is good, because God is dead. But they both share the same foundation. They both are, as Nietzsche puts it, unfaithful to every tradition, even to their own memories. They allow them to fall, 'lose their leaves'. And what they do not do for themselves, they also do 'not do for the whole past of mankind': they let it fall (Nietzsche 1967b, aphorism 21). Like the rider on a horse rushing forward, they 'let the reins fall before infinity' (Nietzsche 1896:Book VII, aphorism 224). They sacrifice all the old experience to the purifying flame of the new. They are like those cartoon characters who can walk on thin air as long as they do not notice it, and once they realise, they are bound to fall. The Greeks used the concept of hubris to describe this kind of thinking because of its destructive capacity. It is destructive because it contains a belief that everything is possible and nothing is real (for if everything is possible then nothing is real), or as Nietzsche says, because it rises up to the level where any kind of reality ceases to be, where it can despise every form, everything firm, 'all that is custom, institution, Church... ' (Nietzsche 1972: aphorism 29). Few are
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Christian or revolutionaries nowadays, but the appeal for nothingness lies not in love or freedom, but in language in which every word is only a mask of itself. It lies in endless semiosis, in communication without any content. Ironically, this is exactly what Nietzsche finds at the heart of Christianity. The task of Nietzsche's philosophy, as well as that of Foucault's, is, in one way or another, to complete this tradition, the tradition of nihilism which breaks all the illusions of stability and permanence. Even the body, as Foucault claims, cannot function as the basis of existence, for it is 'totally imprinted by history' (Foucault 1984:83). However, their nihilism is not transcendent and negative or immanent and reactive, but is based on the idea of complete immanence and is absolutely positive. For them, every singular form of life is an effect of immanent forces of being ('the will to power'). Their nihilism is no longer imperfect (in so far as they do not erect new moral obligations) but perfect. However, only this kind of nihilism, complete nihilism, which shows itself as formlessness and powerlessness, is, in the end, the point of departure for every true ethics from which it has to strive (withouttaking it as a foundation) towards a form and power. And this is precisely the point of view from which Foucault's last works have to be examined. For they are not critiques of power, but an effort to find a power which is capable of staying indifferent in relation to biopower.
Power of ethos The human sciences have made an immense effort to solve the riddle of the human being: they have wanted toknowwhomanis. Buttheproblemofthe human being (ifitis a problem) is nota problem of knowledge, but a problem of ethics, a problem of ethical practices. If it is true, as Foucault claims, that 'no morality is possible for modern thought' (Foucault 1989:328) in the era of modern man as an anthropological figure, then it is understandable why he celebrated the death of man. The death of man (complete nihilism) is the condition of all ethics, or as Foucault put it: 'It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man's disappearance' (Foucault 1989:342). Foucault's formulation of the death of man as the condition of thinking and therefore of ethics is analogous to Giorgio A gamben's idea that the point of departure for any ethics, 'is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realise' (Agamben 1993:43). If it is so that human beings had this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible because there would be only tasks to be done. This was precisely what Immanuel Kant was thinking when he, in the preface of Foundation of The Metaphysics ofMorals he demanded that we should construct 'a pure moral philosophy which is completely freed from everything which may be only empirical and thus belong to anthropology' (Kant 1976:51-52). If the human sciences have ceaselessly been seeking for an answer to the question of what is the real content of man regardless of any morals, Kant asked, on the contrary, what is the pure form of morals regardless of man. But it is equally wrong to claim that the human being is not, that he is simply consigned to nothingness and therefore can freely decide whether to be or
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not to be, to adopt or not to adopt this or that destiny. In reality, there is something that the human being is and has to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: 'It is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or power (potenza)' (Agamben 1993:43). Rather than as an essence or as an absolute I, the human being that is capable of ethics (and in so far as he is capable of ethics he is a human being), has to be seen as possibility or power. Spinoza, in turn, has expressed it as follows: an essence and the only essence of the mode of existence is power (potentia). This power or'endeavour' (conatus) 'wherewith a thing endeavours to persist (perseverare) in its being', in so far as it belongs to a human being, is the first and only basis of virtue (virtus) (Spinoza 1989: prop.7, part III, def. 8, IV, and corollary, prop.22, part IV). The more man has existence the more he has power, and the more he has power the more he has virtue. Thus, first of all Spinoza separates lack, debt and obligation from ethics and replaces them with power. Secondly, he exposes the whole question of ethics as a question of the manner (modus) of life. He separates ethics from life in general (immanent or transcendent) and replaces it with manners. Ethics does not concern life but a manner of life. It concerns the power of human being or the human being as power which is based on manners, habits, and forms of life, that is to say, on life which exists nowhere else than in its own manner, in its own form. The essence of man (if there is an' essence' in man) lies in a manner of life and his power is identical to that manner. Thus, it is evident that the power of a human being is not located in some identity or property (being black or white, being communist or liberal, being Finnish or Australian), neither in the absence of these identities, in negative identity (in nothingness). For identity (fragmented or not), is nothing but a hiding place for timid individuals, a place that diminishes the power of acting and cuts off human freedom. However, one has to consider that this manner does not erect a new foundation, it does not found us or befall us, rather, as Agamben says, it engenders us (Agamben 1993:27-9). Our manner of life refers not to life, but to the manner in its rising forth, to the singular form of life as it exists as such. When Spinoza writes that 'to act absolutely from virtue is nothing else than to act according to the laws of one's own nature' (Spinoza 1989, proof, prop.XXIV, part IV), this nature should be understood as a habit, ie. as our second nature. Only this nature, which is also our happier nature, can provide us with a place of living (where we can 'feel at home'). For every habit, as the concept implies, every ethos is, properly speaking, a dwelling. We inhabit our habit, as Heidegger writes. And if this habit is looted, we become mere living bodies at the level of naked life, pure and easy targets of biopower and thanatopolitics. If we want to resist this power, we should not do it on the grounds that we are living beings, but on the grounds that our life has a specific form.
Community However, it is essential to note that this form, this manner or form of being, insofar as it is singular, appears or takes place only in common. Singularity does not refer to an individual. Rather, singularity appears where individual disappears. Singularity appears where there is a community. There
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are no singularities without communities. We are born to a community, we are educated in a community, we live in a community. There is no such a thing as an individual, because individual, as the word indicates, is an atom without relation, an undivided. However, there is nothing without relation. Atoms are not enough, for we need the Lucretian clinamen which is the condition of possibility of the existence. According to Lucretius nothing could exist if atoms did not form bunches and bunches are not possible without a knot or glue, without clinamen. Individualism claims that it is the individual that must be taken as origin and as certainty. But in reality, the individual can be the origin and the certainty of nothing but his own death (see Nancy 1991:3). And death should not be understood here as a phenomenological event, but as a fact that man does not live forever, that he will die. (Even being alone I am not alone, for the Other appears in front of me despite the fact that there is nobody else present than me, for I is an other: 'Jeestunautre ... ' asRimbaud writes and Deleuzeaffirms. Forme, as a passive object of knowledge, I, an active thinker, am always the other as it thinks but cannot be known (see Deleuze 1993:42-45). Our community is always a community of others. Or as Heidegger puts it, 'Being with others belongs to the Being of Dasein, which is an issue for Dasein in its very Being' (Heidegger 1962:166). However, this community, which engenders us, is not tied up with something which is common to each of us. It is not, for example, a community of citizens or men. Being in common (etre-en-commun, as Nancy writes) is not added onto the dimension of being-self, rather it is coextensive with it. But that does not signify that it is a substance uniformly laid out under supposed individuals. Nor is it uniformly shared out among all individuals like some divisible ingredient. Rather, it signifies a mode of exposition of singular beings without an essence. It signifies shared existence that only appears in common, or 'com-pears', com-paraltre, as Nancy puts it referring, at the same time, to the fact of appearing in common and the acts of distribution and partition - acts of communication (see Nancy 1991:28). The community which engenders us is a web or a knot of the singularities appearing in common. But this knot is not a bond, neither social nor economic, for the 'compearance' is of a more original order than that of the bond: 'It does not set itself up (ne s'instaurepas), it does not establish itself, it does not emerge among already given subject (objects). It consists in the appearance (dans la parution) of the between as such: you and I (between us) - a formula in which the end does not imply juxtaposition, but exposition' (Nancy 1991:29). The nation-state tries to set a human being to a direct relation with itself, it tries to abstract him from his community and isolate him as a powerless island, as an in-dividual. Or it tries to fuse him with the greater spiritual totality saturated with tasks and duties, the totality called nation. Community without an essence, community which is nothing else than the exposition of the singular beings, their manner of exposition, signifies resistance to this kind of abstraction and fusing, resistance to the modern biopolitics: 'Community is given us with being and as being, well in advance of all our projects,desires,andundertakings'(Nancy1991:35).Theplace(orratherthe non-place) of this community is the place of the political, insofar as the
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political signifies nothing else than the taking place of a conflict as such. There is no other place for community. This place is not essential because it is the taking place of freedom, but because it gives rise to the existence of being-self. Only a being in common can make possible a being separated, being-self. But if this community has no positive terms, is it nihilistic? Yes and no. Nihilism is certainly a factor, but it does not form part of its foundations. Nihilismisjusttheweakestandnotthemostevilelementofthiscommunity. Nihilism is not evil: rather evil is our inadequate reaction to this impotence, this power not to be. Evil is, says Agamben, our fearful retreat from this 'demonic element' in order to exercise some power of being. Fleeing from our own impotence or trying to adopt it as a weapon, we construct the malevolent power that oppresses those who show their weakness. The ethical task, on the contrary, is, as Agamben writes, to take care of this demon (Agamben 1993:32). This impotence which every power essentially possesses as its proper element, in so far as it is ethical and not 'blind', is what most needs our help and our prayers, because only a power that is 'capable of both power and impotence' (Agamber 1993:36) is the supreme power, in other words, power which is capable of being at ease with itself. Only this kind of power, which is able to act and not to act and which feels at home in this conflictual situation or can 'stand' or 'endure' in this irresoluteness is free. Ethics (and politics) is the use of this freedom. The only reason why the biopower that constitutes the basis of modem politics is capable of grasping a human being (and making him only an individual without a community) is that it is based on the pure fact of life, on life without a form. When Michel Foucault made a return to the ancient Greeks and Romans, when he started to explore practices of the self, he did not make a return to the subject. On the contrary, and especially when he talked about the Romans, he arrived at the edge of the power and power relations which were not in direct relationship to pure sovereign or normalising power. For, in the Roman 'complex network of power', as Foucault writes, 'one is never alone facing one's enemies' (Foucault 1990b:92). With the help of practices of the self, the Greeks and Romans did not search for their deepest self, the most original experience, but searched instead for their proper manners or form which they could freely use 'to shape themselves as ethical subjects' and to establish their own ethos (Foucault 1987:13). For Foucault, practices of the self are an effort to gather up the pieces of forms of life (community) engendered by manners and experience (understood as practical and definitely not as 'lived' experience: Erfahrung rather than Erlebnis), which modem political power has been trying to destroy for centuries. However, the question is not of the blind acceptance of manners and experiences, but of remembering them and of living with this memory (which we have to cherish - not because it is worthy of being cherished but because it is our second nature, the true form of ourselves). It does not make any difference how we take this memory, for the most essential thing is that we take it, that we do not 'lose our leaves' and step with dropped reins to the bottomless abyss of stupidity.
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References Agamben, Giorgio (1993a). Infancy and History, Essays on the Destruction ofExperience, Verso. __ _, (1993b ). The Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press. Arendt, Hannah (1958). The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press. Canguilhem, Georges (1991). The Normal and The Pathological, Zone. Deleuze, Gilles (1993). Critique et clinique, Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1991). Qu'est ce que la philosophie? Minuit. __ _, (1988). A Thousand Plateaus, Athlone. Ewald, Fran<;ois (1992). 'A power without an exterior', in Timothy J. Armstrong (ed. ), Michel Foucault Philosopher, Harvester. __ _, (1990). 'Norms, Discipline, and The Law', Representations, 30, Spring. Foucault Michel (1990a). The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, Vintage. __ _, (1990b ). The Care of The Self, Penguin. __ _, (1989). The Order of Things, Routledge. __ _, (1987). The Use of Pleasure, Penguin. __ _, (1984). 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, Penguin. __ _, (1983). 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Interview with Michel Foucault', in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin (1962). Being and Time, Basil Blackwell. Kant, Immanuel (1976). 'Critique of Practical Reason', Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, Glencoe. __ _, (1976). 'Foundation of The Metaphysics of Morals', Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, Glencoe. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991). The Inoperative Community, University of Minnesota Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1972). Twilight of The Idols and The Anti-Christ, Penguin. __ _, (1967a). 'Attempt at a self-criticism', preface to the second edition of The Birth of The Tragedy, Vintage. __ _, (1967b ). The Will to Power, Vintage. __ _, (1896). Jentseits von Gut und Bose, Neuman. Spinoza (1989). Ethics, Everyman.
An Exegesis of the Text Was ist Aufkliirung? Foucault's Intellectual Testament
Introduction The main purpose of the present paper is to suggest that one of Foucault's last texts, 'What is Enlightenment?' (WIE), can be interpreted as his intellectual testament: a sort of synoptic expression of the foundational points of view of his thinking in a retrospective and prospective manner. I will be looking at Foucault's text as a palimpsest on Kant's Was ist Aufkliirung? In order to expound this idea, I will present an itinerary of Foucault's encounters with Kant's work. I believe that Foucault subtly changes the fundamental question asked by Kant. In effect, after reminding us that Was ist Aufkliirung? was a question posed by a German periodical, Foucault asks us to imagine that 'the Berliner Monatschrift still exists and that it is asking its readers the question: What is modern philosophy?' (WIE:32). With this change, Foucault is proposing that the very beginning of modern philosophy is rooted in the Enlightenment. Foucault's response to the question about modern philosophy is conceived as the attempt 'to answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: 'Was ist Aufkliirung?' What is the imprudence of the question asked of Kant? Are there relationships between Kant's answer and Foucault's response? These two questions will guide our exegesis on Foucault's 'What is Enlightenment?' There is another reason for interpreting Foucault's WIE as a Kantian palimpsest. The text is divided into two parts. The first and shorter one, considers Kant's text. At the end of that first part, Foucault states thatitisnot possible 'to give an exaggerated place' (WIE:37) to the Kantian text in the global context of Kant's work. Nevertheless, Foucault stresses the connection of that brief Kantian text with the Kantian Critiques, and the other Kantian texts devoted to history. In this connection, Foucault suggests the hypothesis that Kant's WIE is 'a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise' (WIE:38). Exactly the same reflection that he is engaging in in his own piece and there is more: the Kantian reflection 'on 'today' as difference in history and as a motive for a particular philosophical task is viewed by Foucault as the primordial novelty of Kant's WIE, and this novelty allows this text to be interpreted as 'a point of departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity'. Exactly the attitude which Foucault identifies as the authentic ethos of the modern philosopher. The second part of Foucault's WIE is completely devoted to explaining this 'attitude of modernity'. It seems to me that this attitude, this ethos, is the fundamental key to understanding the foucaultian praxis of intellectual life in a retrospective and prospective manner.
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The retrospective view in 'What is Enlightenment? Foucault's 'What is Enlightenment?' draws a context in which one can understand the move from the archaeological stance to the genealogical one or, in another well known characterisation of Foucault's work, the move from the interest in diagnosing the formation of human sciences to the critique of power relations in our modern society, to finally reach the search for an ethics of our existence. In this sense, it is not difficult to show that the 'history of the present'- or the historical'ontology of ourselves', based on the interplay among our constitution as subjects of our own knowledge (savoir), as subjects of the exercise of power relations, and as moral subjects of our own actions (WIE:48-9) - exists as a permanent construction in the whole work of Foucault. From Madness and Civilization to The History of Sexuality, all the historico-critical works of Foucault are steps in advancing the diagnosis of the present. This present is conceived as 'a privileged region', a region that 'is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us' (AK:130). The purpose of the diagnosis of the present is not to 'establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions'. The diagnosis' establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of our discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks' (AK:131). When Foucault interprets Kant's WIEhe finds in Kant's definition of Aufkliirung an Ausgang (a way out, an exit), a sort of conception of history based on diagnosing the present: Kant is not looking for teleology: 'he is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or a future achievement; he is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?' (WIE:34). The foucaultian diagnosis of the present conceived in this sense can be retraced as a permanent task aiming to answer the question which Foucault found in his first explicit encounter with a Kantian work. This first encounter occurred in his These Complementaire (an early work which consists in an interpretation of Kant's Anthropology as a complement to a French translation by Foucault). In this text, he identifies his own work under the name' archaeology of the text', and he delineates the future treatment of another of Kant's works by putting the question: 'If it were possible, would not the archaeology of the text allow us to see the birth of a "homo criticus", whose structure would be essentially different to the man who preceded him?' (TC:4). Kant's Anthropology was his last work published in 1798, thirteen years after his first book on morals. Kant, more interested in his metaphysical work, conceives anthropology as the empirical field of moral philosophy, 'a pure moral philosophy that is wholly cleared of everything which can only be empirical and can only belong to anthropology' (GMM:2). He defines anthropology as 'a systematic doctrine of knowledge of man' which, from a pragmatic point of view, explores 'what man as a being of free activity makes, or can and should make of himself' (A:ll). Foucault's reading of Kant's concept of man in the Anthropology ('man as world citizen' in Kant's words) contrasts the moral empirical field related to moral metaphysics with another empirical (experienced, concrete, effective) field of human praxis: precisely the network of knowledge on madness in the Classical Age.
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Probably, this contrast is responsible for Foucault's rejection of transcendental philosophy. In Madness and Civilization, this rejection is based on the interpretive analytic of the field of madness. The rejection should be seen as a double announcement of the second encounter with Kant's work. On the one hand, atthe end of the brief introductory note to the Anthropology translation there is a footnote which states 'the relations between critical thinking and anthropological reflection will be studied in a future work' (A:lO). On the other hand, Foucault evokes Nietzsche's'death of God' as his inspiration for the questions about man: Is not the death of God, in effect, manifest in a doubly murderous gesture which, by putting an end to the absolute, is at the same time the murder of man himself? For man, in his finitude, is not separable from the infinity of which he is both the negation and the herald. Is it not possible to conceive of a critique of finitude which would be liberating with respect to both man and infinitude, and which would show that finitude is not an end, but the curve and knot of time in which the end is the beginning? (TC:l26).
In The Order of Things, Foucault cannot elude the encounter with Kant. In fact, the modern episteme, as conceived in the foucaultian archaeology of human sciences, also has its verification in the philosophical field. Kantianism can be understood as the constitutive historical a priori of the modern episteme (Le Blanc:57). The substitution of the Kantian transcendental analytic for an analytic of man, as the modern constitution of the' analytic of finitude' (OT:IX-3), is the beginning of the confusion of empirical and transcendental fields. This analytic of finitude marks the birth of the man: 'Man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows: enslaved sovereign, observed spectator, he appears in the place belonging to the king, which was assigned to him in advance by Las Meninas, but from which his real presence has for so long been excluded' (OT:312). Foucault also sees in this analytic of man, in this analytic of finitude, the birth of modernity. Dreyfus and Rabinow summarise this point clearly: Modernity begins with the incredible and ultimately unworkable idea of a being who is sovereign precisely by virtue of being enslaved, a being whose very finitude allows him to take the place of God. This startling idea, which breaks forth full blown in Kant, that 'the limits of knowledge provide a positive foundation for the possibility of knowing' (OT:317), Foucault calls the analytic of finitude. It is 'an analytic ... in which man's being will be able to provide a foundation in their own positivity for all those forms that indicate to him that he is not infinite' (OT:315). Foucault recognizes this desperate move as definitive both of man and of the modem age (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:30).
The analytic of finitude as an anthropological view of man is a permanent temptation to edify the 'metaphysics of life, work and language' as a culture which thinks the finite from itself. 'Our culture crossed the threshold beyond which we recognise our modernity when finitude was conceived in an interminable cross-reference with itself' (OT:318). In sum, the modern view of man is the anthropological answer to the (Kantian) question Was ist der Mensch? But it was not the Kantian answer.
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Foucault clearly states that the Kantian characterisation of knowledge as a empirico-transcendental doublet, only constitutes the point of discontinuity between dogmatic and anthropological configuration of philosophy: from a dogmatic slumber to an anthropological one. In Foucault's view, the question Was ist der Mensch?, has marked thought from the beginning of nineteenth century with the 'constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet' (OT:319). Nevertheless, he implicitly recognises that Kant maintains a clear distinction between transcendental philosophy and anthropological research, although in the Logik, the three critical questions- What can I know?, What ought I do? and What may I hope?- are subordinated to the question Was ist der Mensch? (OT:341). For Foucault, the possible waking from anthropological slumber consists in transposing the work of thinking onto the vacuum of man. All of Foucault's historico-critical works- concentrated in concrete human experience and concrete knowledge about man (les sciences humaines)are a permanent construction of roads to another way of thinking. Foucault, looking on his own work, conceives a historical investigation that focuses on 'the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognise ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying' (WIE:46). Beyond the three Kantian critiques, is it possible to see in Kantian philosophy another way of thinking as a 'critique of the anthropological dream'? It seems to me that this is an implicit question in The Order of Things. Twelve years later, Foucault began to answer this question.
The second direction: the prospective view in WIE. Foucault's 'What is Enlightenment?' should be read as an invitation to continue a historico-philosophical work which brings 'some measure of clarity to the consciousness that we have of ourselves and of our past' (WIE:45). Indeed it is a commonplace amongst commentators on 'What is Enlightenment?' to see this as a text in which Foucault explains the sense of his last work and its possible pursuit (Bernstein 1991; Hiley 1988; McCarthy 1991). Here, the cornerstone is that the question of ethics and the work of thought are related in a way so that one is a realisation of the other: bridging both gives rise to a 'limit-attitude'. In 1978 at a Conference held by the French Society of Philosophy, Foucault offered his first analysis of The Aufkliirung as the problem of the modern philosophy. Here, he finds good reasons in the Kantian text to distinguish critique from the Aufkliirung. In exploring the notion of critique, historically, Foucault prefers to contrast 'the art of governing' from the' art of not being governed in a certain way' (QQC:37-8). He proposes to identify the latterwith a' critical attitude'. The realisation of the art of governing dates far back in Western civilisation and its development always run parallel to 'a sort of general cultural form, at the same time a moral and political attitude, way of thinking, etc., which can be named the art of not being governed'. In this sense, critique, as a particular companion of 'governmentalization', of the process of developing technologies of government, of the social practices of individual subjection can be understood as playing the role of 'un-subjection' in the game of 'the politics of truth' (QQC:39).
189 In 1978, Foucault thought that one could interpret Kant's answer of 1784 as a clear distinction between critique and Aufkliirung. He also proposes to understand Kant's answer as an identification of the Aufkliirung with what he names 'critical attitude'. This critical attitude is the modem prolongation of the art of not being governed in a certain way. Obviously, Foucault does not forget the critical - and transcendental - project of Kant. If there is a difference in Kantian philosophy between critique and Aufkliirung it will be only the Kantian stubbornness in 'fixing knowledge as the main task of the critique ... as prolegomena of all present and future Aufkliirung' (QQC:41). The Kantian answer to the question Was ist Aufkliirung?, is not only concerned with a critical attitude in relation to political field but it also concerns the philosophical field. The Kantian response implies both the explanation of a philosophical position with respect to a political regime (the'contract of rational despotism' (WIE:37) proposed to Frederick II), and the clarification of a philosophical position in relation to the philosopher's role in his own time and within philosophy itself. In this respect, it is possible to find a meaning to the imprudence of the question posed to Kant in 1874. In effect, the Kantian answer initiates two paths in the philosophical tradition. The more developed of these is the continuation of the Kantian critical enterprise, or as Foucault puts it, 'a critical attitude in retreat with respect to Aufkliirung'. The other one, less developed, is the continuation of the this same'critical attitude' as 'un-subjection'. The unbalanced beginning of these two paths of philosophical reflection is a consequence of the sudden and accidental introduction of a very new theme into the philosophical field of eighteenth century: 'rational thinking was interrogated ... about its history, its geography, its immediate past, its place and its actuality;... Was ist Aufkliirung? is a symbolic question of that theme' (VES:S). In another text 'La vie, 1'experience et la science' which appeared in the same year as Foucault's address to the French Society of Philosophy he concludes his early reflection on the problem of Aufkliirung: 'Two centuries after its appearance, the Aufkliirung returns both as the way which permits the West to gain consciousness about its present possibilities and liberties accessible, and as the way of questioning the limits and power used by it (VES:7). In 1983 and 1984 (the bicentenary of Kant's text) Foucault completes his palimpsest in answering the question about another way of thinRing in Kantian philosophy. In the same way as in The Order of Things, in which Kant's work is considered as the foundation of the epistemic modernity, now Foucault sees in Kant's works the foundation of historical modernity. It is historical modernity rooted in Kantian considerations on the Revolution and the Aufkliirung. In fact, this philosophical direction constitutes another critical tradition different from that which 'poses the question of the conditions in which true knowledge is possible', a critical tradition developed 'as the analytics of truth' (ATT:95). The prolongation of the 'critical attitude', akin to the question of Aufkliirung, tries to answer another type of question, another type of interrogation: 'What is our present? What is the present field of possible experiences? That is not an analytics of truth; it will concern what might be called an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves'.
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Intellectual work, the work of thought, the way of thinking required by these questions is the permanent realisation of the attitude, the ethos of modernity. Foucault also turns his attention to the Baudelairean notion of modernity underlining clearly what he understands by attitude: 'a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task' (WIE:39). This implies a sort of stylistic of life which is essentially practised as an intellectual task. This attitude is'an exercise in which extreme attention to what is realis confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it' (WIE:41). It seems to me that there are two levels to this intellectual task. Between these two levels, one more concerned with intellectual life and the other, more general, is placed the 'limit attitude'. The first level of the foucaultian modern ethos consists in 'the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us' (WIE:SO). An analysis which takes the form of enquiries with their theoretical coherence (ie. 'the definition of the historically unique forms in which the generalities of our relations to things, to others, to ourselves, have been problematised') and with their methodological coherence (ie. the 'genealogical and archaeological study of practices envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of rationality and as strategic games of liberty'). The second level of that 'attitude of modernity' is concerned with the risky experiments necessary 'to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of liberty', these experiments are responsible for 'a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression' of limits, for going beyond them. It is intellectually conceived as an ethical research. ('Liberty is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the deliberate form assumed by liberty'.) (ECS:4). The limit-attitude of the foucaultian intellectual task is the frail, patient and obstinate construction of a 'philosophical life' in which those two levels are in permanent symbiosis. It is a philosophical life which summarises- in perfect continuity with the historical courage invoked by Kant in his definition of Aufkliirung - both 'the critical reflexion against the abusive techniques of government' and 'the ethical research which allows individual liberty to be founded' (ECS:19). Finally, the foucaultian 'attitude of modernity', that is, the limit-attitude or the modern ethos, proposes the search of 'an aesthetics of existence' in the face of the disappearing, 'idea of a morality as obedience to a code of rules' (AE:49). In our present, this search is only possible in the philosophical life and by means of the concrete work of intellectuals. But as Foucault says: the work of an intellectual is not to shape others' political will; it is, through the analyses that he carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people's mental habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to re-examine rules and institutions and on the basis of this reproblematisation (in which he carries out his specific task as an intellectual) to participate in the formation of a political will (in which he has his role as citizen to play) (CT:265).
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References Foucault's works: (A)
I. Kant. Anthropologie du point de une pragmatique, trans. M. Foucault Vrin,
Paris, 1991 (AE)
'An Aesthetics of Existence', in L.D. Kritzman (ed.) Michel Foucault. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and other writings 1977-1984, Routledge, Lon-
don, 1988, pp.47-53. (AK)
The Archaeology of Knowledge, Tavistock, London, 1972.
(ATT) 'The Art of Telling the Truth' in L.D. Kritzman (ed.). Michel Foucault. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and other writings 1977-1984, Routledge, London, 1988, pp.86-95 (CT)
'The Concern for Truth', in L.D. Kritzman (ed.) (1988), pp.255-67.
(ECS) 'The Ethic of Care of Self as a Practice of Freedom', in Bernauer, Rasmussen, D. (eds), The Final Foucault, MIT Press, 1991, pp.1-20. (OT)
J.
and
The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Vintage- Random House, New York, 1973.
(QCC) 'Qu'est-ce que la Critique? (Critique et Aufkliirung)', Bulletin de la Societe Franr;aise de Philosophie, 84 ieme annee, no. 2, avril-juin 1990, pp.33-63. (TC) ' These Complementaire' for the Doctorates Lettres, University of Paris, 1961. (Fragments quoted and translated by D. Macey. The Lives of Michel Foucault, London: Hutchinson, 1993). (VES) 'La Vie, !'Experience et la Science', Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, 90 ieme annee, no. 1, janvier-mars 1985, pp.3-14. (WIE) 'What is Enlightenment?' in P. Rabinow (ed.). The Foucault Reader, Pantheon Books, New York, 1984, pp.32-50). (The original version 'Qu'est-ce que les Lumieres' was published in April1993 in Magazine Litteraire, no. 309, pp.6174)
Other cited works Bernstein,R. (1991). 'Foucault. Critique as a Philosophic Ethos'. The New Constellation, Polity Press, pp.142-71. Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1983). Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, The University of Chicago Press. Hiley, D. (1988). Knowledge and Power in Philosophy in Question. Essays on a Pyrronian Theme, The University of Chicago Press, pp.86-114. Kant, I. (1991). (A) Anthropologie du point de vuepragmatique (trans. by Foucault), Vrin, Paris. __ _, (1981). (GMM) Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Hackett, Indianapolis. LeBlanc, G. (1993). 'Le conflit des modernites selon Foucault', Magazine Litteraire, no. 309, pp.56-60. McCarthy, T. (1991). 'The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School'. Ideals and Illusions on Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory, MIT Press, pp.43-75.
Clutter and Glitter: Foucault and the Writing of History
'History', writes Foucault in The Order of Things, 'is certainly the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious, and possibly the most cluttered area of our memory; but it is equally the depths from which all beings emerge into their precarious, glittering existence'.l In this paper I want to consider Foucault's writing of history. By this I mean both the way in which he theorises the writing of historical texts, and the manner in which he conducts his own historical work. The former is a matter of methodology and can be best observed in his various comments upon genealogy as an historical approach to the study of the clutter of the past. The manner in which he conducts historical research relates to the concerns of his late essay, 'What is Enlightenment?' with its conception of philosophy as a certain attitude to modernity and the self. Foucault's historical attitude is that he described as being an historian of the present, interested in the glittering existences that subjects might possess today. I want to approach these two interrelated issues by analysing three key texts of Foucault's: The Archaeology of Knowledge, the 1971 essay 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', and the essay on Kant and the Enlightenment. The overall intention is to try to assess the function of history for Foucault's philosophical work by indicating a number of difficulties with his approach to history.2 It is sometimes difficult to disentangle archaeology from genealogy in Foucault's work, other perhaps than by noting the influential weight of Nietzsche in the latter methodology. Certain commentators argue that archaeology as a method of historical investigation is replaced at the start of the 1970s by the Nietzschean-derived genealogy. However, in the Enlightenment essay, Foucault states that his historical work combines archaeology as a method, and genealogy as a 'design'. 3 To elucidate this distinction it is necessary to look briefly at The Archaeology ofKnowledge. Here we repeatedly learn what archaeology is not; only rarely can we discern the contours of what archaeological history writing actually is. Two important features of archaeology do clearly stand out: firstly, it is an attempt to write history in terms of a notion of discontinuity; secondly, it is a form of writing which is rooted in the analysis of history as purely discursive. In his subsequent work Foucault appears, to an extent, to reject the second principle, whilst strengthening the role of the notion of discontinuity. Discontinuity represents a stigma to conventional history since it is that part of memory that historians normally regard it as their task to eradicate. History presents itself to us in the form of 'dispersed events- decisions, accidents, initiatives, discoveries4 that must be rearranged and reordered so as to reveal the essential continuity of events. In this way written history overcomes 'temporal' dislocation'- chance meetings of significant historical
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actors, avenues of action not taken, instructions misheard - so as to be able to explain and interpret the past. Historians were always aware of the contingent nature of historical events but, argues Foucault, regarded this 'given' of history as practically 'unthinkable' (AK:8), since it challenges the essential methodology of most historical work. For Foucault discontinuity, is both a tool of the historian, and a description of the object that one is investigating (AK:S-9). One examines the past through the lens of discontinuity, while also being aware that what one is regarding is itself constitutionally broken and dispersed. Foucault's dislike of continuous, or what he also terms 'total history' (AK:9), is related to his earlier critique of the transcendental subject in The Order of Things. It is not quite clear if he dislikes continuous history because it supports this sovereign subject, or because continuous history is itself sustained by this form of subjectivity. Indeed Foucault avoids this issue by claiming that they are two sides of the same theoretical approach: 'Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject' (AK:12). Continuous history acts as a reassurance to subjectivity, promising to restore, as historical consciousness, all that is different and other to subjectivity. Foucault clearly has in mind here the link of subjective consciousness and historical development found initially in Hegel and then Marx, and which he feels is revived, in a slightly different form, in the twentieth century by phenomenology. Foucault espouses discontinuity so as to assist his aim of defining' a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological theme' (AK:l6). Two initial queries we might raise here would be: firstly, whether history can completely escape the question of subjectivity, as Foucault seems to suggest; and secondly, whether traditional history does always rely upon a linkage of continuous history and a foundational subject, or whether you can have one of these terms without the other. Foucault keeps the notion of discontinuity as a key principle of his historical writing even when he shifts from a solely archaeological perspective. But the other prong of archaeological analysis- its essentially discursive focus - is considerably modified. Archaeology is the study of discourses rather than the objects or events to which discourses or signs refer or represent. Foucault states that he does not analyse discourses in order to write a 'history of the referent' (AK:47). His study of madness, for example, was not an attempt to reconstitute what madness was, before it was represented and organised in a whole variety of discourses. Just as the principle of discontinuity was upheld because it was more faithful to the reality of historical events, so Foucault wishes to value discourses for what they are rather than for what they represent: What we are concerned with is not to neutralise discourse, to make it the sign of something else, and to pierce through its density in order to reach what remains silently anterior to it, but on the contrary to maintain it in its consistency, to make it emerge in its own complexity. What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things' ...To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse (AK:47).
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There are a number of important issues that this statement raises and which I will only sketch out here. Prima facie, Foucault might be saying one of two things. Firstly, his comments could imply that history is only to be regarded as possessing a linguistic existence. If objects and events only emerge in discourse does that entail they have only a discursive existence? It is, therefore, the fact of historical interpretation that produces what we believe to be the events and objects of 'the past'? The second interpretation is that our only access to the events and objects of history is through specific discourses that, in various ways, describe them. This would imply that 'the past' does exist, but that our only grasp upon it is through our own discursive interventions which necessarily contain our own perspectives and interests embedded into them. The first position is, to an extent, a form of quite radical scepticism, while the second, which is closer I think to Foucault's own view, is perspectival or relativist, but not quite so sceptical. Remaining at the level of discourse when one analyses history does not, however, imply treating discourses as subject only to linguistic rules. Discourses are not- as in structuralism- to be treated solely as 'groups of signs (... )but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak' (AK:49). Archaeology studies 'discourses as practices obeying certainrules' (AK:138). SoFoucaultisnotcommitted to the position that history is merely a set of discourses since history is about practices that occur under the constraints of rules. But there are still ambiguities here. If we are to understand discourses as practices does that mean that we should also consider the reverse, and treat practices as discourses? Foucault's adoption of the term' discursive practice' only complicates matters here. And how are we to regard the systematic 'rules' that constrain discursive practices? Are the rules themselves discursively constructed? The epistemological status of history as discourse is, it appears, a little obscure. Foucault's attempt to resolve these difficulties is seen in the essay 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', published two years after The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1971. In effect, it is practices which win out over discourses, whilstthenotionofdiscontinuityisre-emphasisedandfinally helps Foucault break with the structuralist vocabulary of rules of formation. History now is not primarily about discourses but about power. This is a point summarised in a slightly later interview, 'Truth and Power', when Foucault explains his distance from the structuralist perspective upon history: 'I believe one's point of reference should not be to the great model of language (langue) and signs, butto that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning'.s One impetus for this shift from signs to power is Nietzsche's argument that signs are themselves nothing but interpretations of earlier interpretations that have been forgotten or suppressed. Rather than the anodyne theory that discourses are practices governed by innocent rules of formation, Foucault now adopts Nietzsche's view that 'everything that exists, no matter what its origin, is periodically reinterpreted by those in power in terms of fresh intentions' and that this reinterpretation is a forceful' outstripping and overcoming' during which earlier meanings are necessarily destroyed or hidden. 6
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Foucault's 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' essay is an attempt to revise his historical inquiry in the light of this shift from signs and meaning to power and struggle. It is also a vituperative attack upon the methods of conventional historical writing, a much more aggressive critique than is evident in The Archaeology of Knowledge, even though certain themes - such as the importance of discontinuity - remain. Although it is not always evident precisely which historians Foucault would label as 'conventional', the tenor of Foucault's criticism is very clear. Foucault accuses historians of not actually paying sufficient attention to history. Historians are just not meticulous enough, as they hide their gaze from the immense clutter of the past because they desire to write history in the form of a reassuring narrative of origins, explanations and continuities. In The Archaeology Foucault argued that the philosophical itch for foundations manifested itself in conventional history in several ways: one was the linkage of continuous history and the transcendental subject, another was the desire to interpret signs as representations of things. These are still the failings of the historian, but now Foucault is not content to view them as errors of method that can be corrected by detailing sets of procedures for analysing discursive formations. The historian's quest for origins has to be seen as a motivated desire to ignore the actual torn and twisted fabric of history, part of a 'will to power' that writes history from an omniscient perspective where the past makes sense only because the chance and contingent reality of that past is actually violently suppressed: 'The historian's history finds its support outside of time? Conventional history is more properly named a metahistory or a 'suprahistorical history' (NGH:93). Historians try to uncover a 'primordial truth' behind or before 'the external world of accident and succession' (NGH:78). The genealogist, in contrast, refuses these metaphysical comforts and actually 'listens to history', where he or she finds no secret essence behind historical events but rather an essence 'fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms' or that 'reasonable' actions by historical actors have their origin in chance (NGH:78). Foucault, therefore, respects history too much, listens to the singular events, chance occurrences and random beginnings too closely to reduce these 'myriad events' (NGH:81) to some preexistent or imposed narrative. Archaeology sought to split history writing from its comfortable relationship to the idea of the transcendental subject. But now Foucault realises that this separation is not sufficient to free history from the influence of this model of subjectivity. The writing of history must, instead, be actively turned against the transcendental subject in order that it can be properly analysed without the fear that a transcendental conception of subjectivity might return to bridle and contain the contingent and discontinuous events of the past. Thus Foucault writes that the 'purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation (NGH:95). Foucault's concern to study the history of the body, seen most clearly in the 'docile bodies' of Discipline and Punish, can be understood as another part of this critique of the transcendental, and thus dematerialised and non-corporeal, subject.
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Genealogy is concerned with the descent rather than the evolution of events in history, a movement backwards rather than forwards in time. One such series of events is the way the self 'fabricates a coherent identity' from 'numberless beginnings' (NGH:81); to trace the forward evolution of such a self would too readily produce an image of progressive unity. If we reverse the focus of historical study, and work backwards, then this fiction of a unified subjectivity is less likely, argues Foucault, to take hold of us. Analysing descent, he suggests, 'permits the dissociation of the self, its recognition and displacement as an empty synthesis, in liberating a profusion of lost events' (NGH:81). But unlike evolution, which assumes a point of origin, genealogical descent must never reach some point of origination, and instead only seeks 'the moment of arising' or the 'emergence of something as a result of a struggle of forces against one another' (NGH:83). Here I want to pose four problems for Foucault's notion of genealogy as a prelude to considering his later history writing: 1. Is it possible that history as descent might arrive at a point of origin? There might be seen to be a danger that the point at which one concludes one's descent might be regarded as a point of origin. 2. What is it about descent that compels us to see subjectivity as dispersal and not unity? And why is it that evolutionary history is doomed to only ever produce a unified subjectivity? Surely there is nothing inherent in thetemporaldirectionofhistorywritingthatcompletelystructureswhat one will say of the object under investigation. The answer might be that evolutionary history is not just about temporal directions, but about an evaluative notion of progress being embedded in the subject one studies. 3. It is clear that descent helps Foucault introduce the idea of writing a history of the present, a notion most clearly articulated in a 1984 interview: 'I set out from a problem expressed in the terms current today and I trytoworkoutits genealogy. Genealogy means thatibeginmy analysis from a question posed in the present'. 8 This starting point in the present is not designed to confirm a relationship of necessity or inevitability that might hold between the past and the present, such that we understand the past in order to see what has shaped us. Rather, Foucault's history of the present is a development of Nietzsche's point in The Genealogy of Morals that knowledge is always a matter of perspective. 9 Historians must acknowledge their own perspective on the past, their 'grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy'. History is thus a 'curative science' whose perception is slanted, 'being a deliberate appraisal, affirmation, or negation' that examines issues in the post in order to intervene and 'prescribe the best antidote' (NGH:90). Therefore the historian who starts to examine some topic in a previous era should start by asking what it is in the present that makes this topic of contemporaryinterest.Foucaultextendsthispointinalaterdefinitionof genealogy as concerned with the 'insurrection of subjugatedknowledges', those local, illegitimate or disqualified knowledges that are opposed to what Foucault calls 'the tyranny of globalising discourses' such as the disciplinary networks of power analysed in Discipline and Punish. 10 Genealogy in this more political definition attempts to utilise the
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perspectival interests of the historian in the present. Foucault's wish here is to' establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today' .11 Archaeology now reappears as the method for studying and recuperating these local knowledges; genealogy refers to the tactics by which these subjugated knowledges can be freed and 'brought into play' in the present. 12 The question here, however, is the following: how easy is it to utilise historically subjugated knowledges in the present? It might be the case that one might wish to recover a subjugated set of practices, but be unhappy at the historical ideas that may be attached to them. Can one easily be selective about which parts of subjugated knowledges one wishes to employ? 4. The dissipation of identity celebrated by Foucault as an essential part of genealogy arises from a renewed value granted to the idea of discontinuity: 'History becomes "effective" to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being as it divides our emotions, dramatises our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself' (NGH:88). Previously Foucault believed that the recognition of discontinuity resided in the methods one used to study history. As I argued earlier, Foucault then sawtheneedtoturndiscontinuityarounduponthesubjectthatconducts historical investigation. Now I think that the later Foucault realises that this violent annihilation of identity raises more problems that it resolves. It does not necessarily entail that one writes a form of history more attentive to the singular events of the past. This is because the question arises of from where does the historian write if her or his identity is dissolved? Writing from the perspective of the present with a dissolved identity does not really address the question of who it is that is doing the writing, what form of self is interested in these historical events. Maybe Foucault's rhetoric here is necessary in order to erase the transcendental subject, but it is instructive that the final, oblique, sections of 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' seem to reach a kind of impasse. We must not, argues Foucault, judge the past in terms of a truth we can only possess in the present, but must risk 'the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge' (NGH:97). This is because of a recognition that 'all knowledge rests on injustice( ... ) and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious' (NGH:95), and therefore the perspective of the present is also caught up in this obnoxious epistemology. The call, then, for the dissolution of the subject is for the 'destruction of the man who maintains knowledge by the injustice proper to the will to knowledge' (NGH:97). The price, it appears, of the destruction of this injustice is the dissolution of the subject of knowledge. But then who is it that is able to gaze upon the past or present and assert that these events and knowledges are unjust? It appears that Foucault realises the need to reinstate some historical consideration of the subject that writes history in order to know. In the 'Truth and Power' interview, Foucault's definition of genealogy is still that of 'a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledge ... without having to make reference to a subject which is transcendental'.13 But Foucault also sees the need to produce an account of
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subjectivity that amounts to more than its demolition: 'One had to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself... to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework'.1 4 It is only by dissolving the constituting subject of history that Foucault can reach a position where he can begin to study the historical constitution of the subject. In 1981, Foucault commented that his intention was not to analyse power but 'to create a history of the different modes by which, in our cultures, the human being is made "subject"'.l5 This project is theorised quite explicitly in the essay, 'What is Enlightenment?' The subject that reappears is, however, a thoroughly historical subject, bound by chance, difference, contingency rather than possessing a transcendental unity. This is why philosophical critique must engage in what Foucault terms an 'historical ontology of the self', rather than conduct ontology or history by assuming a transcendental subject position as a starting point. A proper attention to history starts by making no assumptions about the nature of the self that appears in the past- it starts by respecting the ungivenness of human subjectivity. If Foucault's interest in Kant's essay on the Enlightenment has its genealogy in the problem of trying to consider subjectivity historically, its point of origin lies in The Order of Things, where Foucault analyses the emergence of the modern episteme between 1775 and 1825. One characteristic of the new episteme is the idea of a history ruled by the concepts of chronology and origin, and which represses the idea of history as 'the radical mode of being of events'.16 This latter view is clearly the one criticised in The Archaeology of Knowledge. But Foucault also notes that this theory of history is a symptom of the' question of knowing what it means for thought to have a history', or, less cryptically, an 'investigation concerned with nothing more nor less than the very being of our modernity' of which we are, he notes, still coming to terms. 17 When Foucault discusses Kant on the Enlightenment it is precisely this awareness of modernity and the historicity of thought around which the text is constructed. In 'What is Enlightenment?' Kant's text is interpreted as 'a point of departure' for what Foucault terms 'the attitude of modernity'. Modernity is an attitude, not an epoch, a 'mode of relating to contemporary reality' (WE:39). It is thus a way of relating to the present that includes thinking, feeling, acting and behaving but, most importantly, has the flavour of a 'task' or 'ethos' with two parts. Foucault now conducts one of his own leaps of historical and intellectual imagination that exemplify his own discontinuous method of writing history. To help characterise the attitude to modernity he has outlined in Kant he produces a very un-Kantian example, Charles Baudelaire. For Baudelaire, writes Foucault, modernity is an experience of the 'is continuity of time' requiring the elaboration of an attitude that can grasp the eternal dwelling within the temporal. The true modern mode of subjectivity follows Baudelaire's command: 'You have no right to despise the present' (WE:39-40). Instead you must form an intimate relationship to the present, just as Kant did in trying to answer the question, what is Enlightenment? This is one part of the 'task' of relating to modernity: the formation of 'a relationship to the present' (WE:41). Clearly, then, Foucault
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is pulling together various elements from his previous work upon historiography: a notion of the discontinuity of history and of subjectivity; the importance of practices; and the idea of an historical understanding of the present. The second part of the 'task' displayed by Baudelaire consists in elaborating 'a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself' (WE:41). This marks the reappearance of considerations of the construction of subjectivity that Foucault had earlier wanted to dissolve in the interests of a proper writing of history. Now historical work must be intimately tied into a consideration of selves and subjects. In Baudelaire, Foucault has found an instance of an Enlightenment attitude worthy of preservation; it is that of a critique of our words, ideas and actions through a 'historical ontology of ourselves' (WE:45). This yokes together the two parts of the task of modernity: forming a relation to the present, and forming a relation to oneself. Foucault's is a rather odd 'ontology', concerned not with universal features of that which exists, but with the differing and not necessarily related forms of existence people have historically produced. This is an ontology of the subject that bears the mark of historical discontinuity through and through. Unlike the earlier uses of discontinuity derived from Nietzsche, the effect now is not to blast apart subjectivity butto see how, historically, the self is put together after an initial dissolution of its transcendental conception. Another innovation is the way inwhichtheconstitutionoftheselfisallowedacertainamountofautonomy. Not subjected by discourses or disciplined by technologies, the constitution of subjectivity is now a series of practices (the 'care of the self or the 'aesthetics of existence') that can be self-employed. This self-formation of subjectivity can be seen in Foucault's notion of how we are to understand the present in terms of 'the contemporary limits of the necessary' (WE:43). Foucault once more eschews a transcendental approach to the self, conceiving his study as an historical one into 'the events that have led us to constitute ourselves' (WE:46). These events are those we now view as the limits of our ontological states. If Kant asked the negative question of what limits knowledge must remain within, Foucault want to pose a more positive question: in what poses as universal in our knowledge is there anything which is the result of contingent constraints and how can these constraints be transgressed? This form of historical inquiry is still genealogical in being brought face to face with the present; it must 'put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take' (WE:46). Foucault'sfinalworkuponthesexualityoftheGreeksandGreco-Romans thus comes to play a key part in his final vision of how one writes history. By considering the past events which have formed us as human subjects we gain a sense of the contingency of those norms and values we tend to regard as universal. History shows us diversity rather than universality, discontinuous modes of acting as 'human subjects'. By writing history we can bring to prominence those constraints upon our present subjectivities that perhaps should be transgressed, the points where change in values and action is possible. The past, then, does not help us understand the present; but it
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might help us have the courage to imagine that the present could be different from the form it manifests at the moment. Perhaps historical writing requires a certain aestheticisation, not to erode the 'truth' of our past, but to enable it to imagine the telling of radically different stories of who we are. Critics have sometimes accused the late Foucault of wanting to recreate the Greek world in the present. I think this misses the point of what he understands to be the work of genealogical history writing. Foucault says of the Enlightenment that what should be preserved is not faithfulness to any specific set of ideas, but rather the 'permanent reactivation of an attitude' which is that of a 'permanent critique of our historical era' (WE:42). Reactivation is the term used by Foucault when he had discussed how genealogy seeks to redeploy historically 'subjugated knowledges' in the present. Now it is not knowledges but an attitude, practices not discourses that Foucault wishes to rescue from the past. It is an attitude that, by examining the vast 'networkofcontingencies'thatishistory,mighthelpus'graspwhyandhow that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is'.18 Discontinuity, then, no longer resides just in the approach to events of the past, or even in the very being of the subject, but now takes up its place in the present as an awareness of how the self can discontinue being a certain kind of subject and work towards some new self. I have tried to argue that Foucault's late work bears the traces of a working through of an approach to the writing of history scattered throughout his major texts. For the final Foucault a sense of the past involves a self-critique from the position of the present, and the new practices sought by subjects can perhaps only be glimpsed in a 'reactivation' of practices from the past. As I have suggested, however, it is the project of 'reactivation' which is perhaps most problematic for Foucault's practice of the writing of history. 1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock, 1970, p.219. My thanks to Moyal Uoyd for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. 2 The best account of the role of history in Foucault's work is that of Clare O'Farrell, Foucault: Historian or Philosopher?, London: Macmillan, 1989. 3 Michel Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?', in Paul Rabinow, (ed.). The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin, 1984, p.46. Further references to this essay will be given in the main text as WE with page number. Foucault also discusses his combined use of archaeology and genealogy in Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure, London: Penguin, 1984, trans. R. Hurley, pp.ll-12. 4 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1972, p.8. Further reference will be given in the main text as AK with page number. 5 Foucault, 'Truth and Power', The Foucault Reader, p.56. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche,'The Genealogy of Morals', in Nietzsche, The Birth ofTragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, New York/London: Anchor Books, 1956, p.209. 7 Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', The Foucault Reader, p.87. All further references will be given in the main text as NGH with page number.
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Foucault, 'The Concern for Truth', in L. Kritzman, (ed.) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, London: Routledge, 1988, p.262.
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Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, p.255.
10 Foucault, 'Two Lectures', in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-7, C. Gordon, (ed.) Brighton: Harvester, 1980, pp.81, 83. 11 Ibid, p.83. 12 Ibid, p.85. 13 'Truth and Power', p.59. 14 Ibid. 15 Cited O'Farrell, Foucault, p.l13. 16 Foucault, The Order of Things, p.219. 17 Ibid. pp.219-20, 221. 18 Foucault, 'Critical Theory /Intellectual History', in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, pp.37,36.
Foucault, Politics and the Performative Patricia Moynihan Since 1989 there has been a marked increase in the number of dilemmas facing any attempt to frame political possibilities. The uncertainties are a product of a number of factors but amongst those generally regarded as most significant have been the events in Eastern Europe. The collapse of socialism combined with a consistent move towards the adoption of the principles of the capitalist market and democratic political system has provoked a serious challenge for many of these academics on the Left who are accustomed to formulating their analyses in terms of Marxism. Those recent pressures on Marxism as a paradigm for economic and political alternativescomesometimeafterthecritiqueofitassocialtheory.Foucault's work has been particularly influential as a source of self-criticism for a decade. As with other post-structuralists, he has directly confronted the taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning the analytic categories of Marxism: the limitations of structural theories of the state, the explanatory weight given to the economy, the implications of vesting liberation in reason and the pursuit of truth. The approach of this paper is to reconsider Foucault's thinking about the political from the perspective of his Nietzschean themes. Particular attention is given to the performative as a framing of an alternative politics. The paper argues that Nietzsche and Foucault's account of the performative involves rejection not only of subjectivity but of any framing of politics that involves a self, including a project regarding an authoritative, independent self. The performative, in contrast, implicitly involves processes of selfovercoming. The paper then explores some of the locations where we might find signs of the performative. Foucault describes his position on what to do about the problem of politics in an interview with Raulet (1983). In response to a question about his intentions he replied that he hoped that his work would make possible the recognition that 'things could be different'. The description could be regarded as providing support for those who would see and decry a normative neutrality in Foucault's position. In its implied refusal to adhere to the norms of modern political practice, to take a position, set an agenda and write meta-narrative, it appears to confirm interpretations of his work asradicallyrelativistorperhaps,nihilistic. Consistentwith that,italsolends confirmation to strategies that would confine Foucault's influence to the problematisation and critique of the current operation of the social. Martin Jay's recent text Downcast Eyes (1993) is not atypical in identifying Foucault with a theoretical genre which is suffering from a loss of hope; a deep pessimism that can no longer believe in and therefore promote, a project. However, Foucault's reply to Raulet was located in a wider context, one in which Nietzsche's influence on Foucault was being discussed. Under
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those circumstances 'recognition that things could be different' links into and levers open a number of issues in regard to Foucault's work generally and his politics in particular. Further, it suggests that Foucault expected that his readers could take away from their engagement with his fictions their own sense of what the political would consist of. Yet, as Ansell-Pearson has commented in relation to Nietzsche, there are considerable difficulties to surmount in an attempt to frame the political in terms outside those recognisable to the modern. Foucault found in Nietzsche the way round the dilemma of framing a politics that did not promote the very problems he was identifying in his critique of the modern. Like Nietzsche, his work explored the way in which things can originate out of their opposite, in particular, the relation between the will to truth and deception, or in Nietzsche's terms, 'slavery'. Much of Nietzsche's account of the dynamics involved is embedded in his description of the operation of Christian morality. As he saw it, the JudeaChristian tradition has turned weakness into a virtue, has promoted a slave morality by privileging fear. As 'the mother of all morality' (BGE:201), fear entrenches and legitimates prohibitions; in Christianity, the body and its passions. Their replacement with pity and compassion consolidates a slave morality insofar as they are values which strip the will to power of its independence, its command and its creativity. Nietzsche's critique is however less concerned with Christian morality per se than its influence on post-Enlightenment philosophy. God is dead but the principles of slave morality have been transferred across into a search for Truth. Thus for instance, Kant in his 'homesickness' has taken the metaphysics of Judeo-Christian morality and embedded it within his philosophical project. For the purposes of this paper there are three components of Nietzsche's critique of Kant which are of particular importance: the will to truth, causal analyses, and the subject/ object dualism. Together, they provide the basic framework of Nietzsche's critique of the modern and the point of departure for his proposal of an alternative. Nietzsche's alternative to the bourgeois pattern of collapsing the will to power into the will to truth involves making a move 'beyond good and evil', that is beyond a system of reasoning that establishes new and more pervasive techniques for judgement. However, Nietzsche's art is such that it is not always readily apparent what his alternative consists of. His riddles, spiders (Derrida), or double coding, can have the effect of attributing to Nietzsche a voice which is not only just one among the chorus of positions he puts forward but also one which is distinctly not his. Thus for instance, there is a widely held view that the alternative involves mastery (see for instance Ansell-Pearson). On that reading, Nietzsche is proposing as the site for independence and authority that which is occupied by the aristocracy. Rank and hierarchy are consequently a feature, along with the rightful subordination of 'the herd', 'the common man'. It seems clear on closer reading, however, that mastery is the source of the problem, not its solution. Slaves 'play the master', incorporating principles of mastery into their slave revolt. Those components that we have discussed in terms of 'resentment', ie. the seeking after someone I something responsible, is a trait of masters adopted
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and adapted by slaves to make sense of their suffering. The death of God only heightens the need for the comfort that meaning, now secularised, provides. Above all, it is mastery in its construction of slavery which provides the situation for which consolation is sought. Without masters, with their domination and exploitation there would be neither danger nor fear: 'If one could at all do away with danger, the cause of fear, one would have done away with this morality at the same time, it would no longer be necessary,itwouldnolongerconsideritself any longer necessary' (BGE:113). Nietzsche's alternative has to therefore avoid not only'good and evil' but also mastery. Mastery is sourced in the compliance with the expectation that the honourable are required to 'keep their promises' (GM:40). That association of ethics with social status and social esteem introduces both instrumentalism and asceticism. Together they provide the basis for duty, the externally imposed but accepted expectation of obligation, responsibility and predicability. Nietzsche finds his alternative to that framing in nobility: 'at present it belongs to the conception of 'greatness' that a man would be noble ... to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative' (BGE:212). Nobility eschews making judgements of others as 'intellectually shallow' and refuses to allow others to exercise that authority over him/her. Instead the 'noble' is the expression of the 'mind strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value' (BGE:203). His alternative thus acts to dismantle the processes of both slavery and mastery. A prime target amongst them is the self. As the self is a central vehicle for delivering technologies of domination/ subordination it takes a crucial place in Nietzsche's alternative. It is a project of self-overcoming in which fear, proscription and virtue, with their concomitant weak will is replaced by a strong will. It is at this point that we can start to see the shape of Nietzsche's politics. Democracy centres a subject which is subordinate to a form of regulation that 'inscribes itself with equal demands on soul and body' (BGE:240). Selfovercoming dismantles the subject through which regulation operates. In addition the replacement of mastery I slavery by nobility allows the reentering of traits which Nietzsche associates with the Dionysian. JudeaChristian processes of judgement are represented in terms of a culture of asceticism as Apollonian: rigorous, rational, controlled and punitive. The Dionysian in contrast is perhaps most readily recognised in Bakhtin's carnivalesque; it is playful, artful, ironic and sceptical. Underlying the Dionysian is Nietzsche's commitment to spiritualising all aspects of life, both its strengths and weaknesses, and including the body and its passions. The Dionysian is art without boundaries or structures. It also brings the artist back in from her /his exclusion by Kantian categories. And as Nietzschean 'immoralist', the artist re-introduces within art not just creativity, action and movement but also transgression. Amongst the effects then, is that Dionysian art challenges the limits placed on art by aesthetics, that is, by the processes put in place by pursuing the question 'whatis beauty?' This liminal Dionysian thereby carries the capacity to return the body and the mask to art where together they can cheat aesthetics, the Apollonian, of its
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capacity to reduce creativity down to a problem of knowledge. Consequently, not only does creativity resurface in the Dionysian, but in the absence of mechanisms of distinction and dominance, it takes the form of an inseparable combination of doer and deed. Art and the artist are one. More generally then, rather than having a self emerging out of the construction of knowledge of an object, that is, in division and subordination, creativity asserts the possibility of the performative. Nietzsche's politics involves an exploration of that performative, 'the deed and its creativity' (GS:451). In this context of doer/deed, the will to power recovers the capacity to will freely which had been lost as the effects of epistemological framing turned it into a will to truth. The pursuit of 'free will' had generated its opposite- regulation. The performative, by operating beyond epistemological framing allows the will to life, to repossess its Dionysian dimensions excluded by the will to truth. This form of the political then, resists turning things into problems of knowledge, refuses resentment, allows the resurfacing of difference, and rejects formulations of subjectivity. The Dionysian positions movement against Apollonian form and will to power against will to truth. Without form or truth the basis of modernist processes of judgement dissolve and are replaced by the dynamic of creativity in which judgement emerges out of criteria specific to the performative. Nietzsche's final position recombines the Apollonian and the Dionysian so that judgement and creativity operate together. But judgement still rests on criteria constructed out of creativity rather than truth. Rather than being incompatible with playfulness, the ironic, and the physical, judgement emerges out of these formerly transgressive opposites, the other side of the dualisms. Nietzsche could never be accused of 'normative neutrality'. Despite his efforts to critique the metaphysical, to develop a 'psychology' rather than a social theory and to explore the potential of aphorisms, double coding, poetry and fiction to dismantle philosophical form and structure, his success in avoiding the metaphysical has been open to question. The teleological aspects of his project suggest that there are grounds for Heidegger's description of him as the 'last metaphysician'. Nietzsche's attempt to illustrate the movement of the performative in his own work has, on this reading, been defeated by its position in an end-directed project. In my view, Foucault's work is in part an attempt to address and resolve the problem of teleology raised in the analysis of Nietzsche's formulation of the performative. Further, that it is in the character of the solution Foucault found that we also find his politics. Broadly speaking, to draw out the Nietzschean themes in Foucault's work provides the conditions for the unmasking of his politics. However, the purpose of this paper is to focus on those issues most central for recognising signs of the performative in our contemporary social formation, so I will take out of Foucault's work only the most pivotal observations. My starting point is the concluding section of Madness and Civilisation where he sets out the processes involved in the attempts to impose subjectivity on those defined as transgressive, in this case 'the mad'.
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As he argues neither the entry of the discipline of medicine into the asylum nor the effects of its presence are related to the content of its knowledge: 'If the medical personage could isolate madness it was not because he knew it, but because he mastered it' (MC:272). In Madness and Civilization, then, Foucault is already giving emphasis to processes, not content. The relations activated by mastery are the location of the capacity to construct a context of judgement in which the mad are to develop a consciousness of themselves as objectively mad. The processes involved allow the entry ofbourgeois cultural values into the shaping of practices that were being associated with the authority of science. The mad would be trained to take responsibility for their madness through the mediations of 'that delicate structure which would become the essential nucleus of madness- a structure that formed a kind of microcosm in which were symbolised the massive structures of bourgeois society and its values' (MC:274). That construction of the mad as the Other and the concomitant silencing of madness was also facilitated by the deployment of the discourse of the social. The eighteenth century saw associations being made between madness and 'social failure', that is, the failure to comply with the social. The social was thus brought to bear not only as the formalisation of divisions constructed on the basis of danger and fear, but also in the formulation of social universals which suggested a generalised capacity of the mad to undermine coherence and order. Foucault's description of the operation of the human sciences thus follows Nietzsche in seeing elements of mastery and 'resentment' underlying the constitution of a self. The organisation of action into a subject involves silencing people's own knowledges and replacing them with a sense of the gap between themselves and the bourgeois ideal. It is in that distance ('the pathos of distance') that judgement resides and with it the source of the transgressive identity which provides the conditions for becoming an object to oneself. That theme of judgement acting through displacement receives further development in Discipline and Punish. Here, the imposition of subjectivity is the catalyst for establishing divisions within the culture of a class. The respectable, responsible, approved working class becomes divided from that part of the class seen as delinquent, criminal, transgressive. As with Nietzsche, fear is a catalyst for mobilising processes which generate hostility and suspicion. It is important to notice that the division depends on there being a group which does not accept the imposition of identity, the mechanics of which were described in Madness and Civilisation. Discipline and Punish also explores the impact of this transgressive group on the policy initiatives of liberal humanism. First, it is the response to their ongoing transgression which provides the impulse behind the spread the carcerel. Without their continued non-compliance there would be no incentive to elaborate increasingly more interventionist strategies. Second, and associated with that, is the pivotal role Foucault gives to failure in his account of the operation of discipline. The literature quite frequently interprets failure in systemic terms, that is, as a feature of the system. Yet disciplinary systems can only fail if there is opposition to them. That professionals should account for failure in terms of an incapacity to get the degree of proximity required to
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change people, can only emerge out of a sense that they have not changed. They can thus be seen as having resisted taking on the identity of a bourgeois, responsible, but transgressive, subject. Clearly then, the 'criminal' suggests success in resisting the external imposition of judgement that would have their own knowledges silenced, displaced and replaced. The History of Sexuality suggests that in contrast, Foucault has serious misgivings about the political strategies of the gay community. As he sees it, engaging in the struggle to dismantle the structures that constitute the Other by using modern political strategies has serious drawbacks. The objective of taking apart the foundations of the Other by becoming part of the mainstream involves taking on the norms and thereby the judgements of the human sciences. In Foucault's critique, the human sciences, by deploying the categories, assigning identity and extrapolating norms, are a major vehicle for imposing judgement in contemporary society. The norms carry the same components of morality that Nietzsche identified: fearprohibition-suffering-blame. As a version of slave morality, the human sciences cultivate a stance that generates the same resentment that makes 'homosexuals' victims. By seeking liberation, and further, to frame that liberation in terms of 'homosexuality' involves accepting the coding of transgression and the resentment it involves. It also accepts subjectivity with its norms and judgements, that striving for improvement which Foucault, like Nietzsche, sees as the antithesis of 'freedom'. Their liberatory project has therefore caught them up in a process which confirms the values and strategies of the straight community and which are a major factor in the oppression of the gay community. Foucault is making a point similar to that which Nietzsche makes in regard to women, that they are abandoning that which is a source of self-overcoming in favour of 'fear and mastery'. Foucault also sees the gay community losing the grounds upon which they do operate as a force of opposition. For to take on the subject position of 'homosexual' involves the displacement of people's own framings. And for Foucault that which is beyond the 'homosexual' has avoided epistemological framing. Thus in The History ofSexuality val 1 he provided two examples of formulations operating outside the boundaries of 'sexuality'. 'Ars erotica' and 'the body and its pleasures' are illustrations of the performative. That is, each positions an inseparable doer and deed. For Foucault then, there lies beyond homosexuality with its transgressive identities, a form of life that is consistent with a Nietzschean will to power. The body and its pleasures refuses problematisation and prohibition in favour of Dionysian creativity in which pleasure and pain, strengths and weaknesses produce the heterogeneity of a self that is in the process of becoming. It also can generate the criteria for exercising judgement, thereby allowing autonomy without subjectivity and avoiding the trap of the normative. The body and its pleasures and ars erotica stand as two sites of resistance to subjectivity, the framing of the Other and the norm. And as with the transgressive criminal, there is no agenda for change. Yet volume one of The History of Sexuality shows us that insofar as the gay community does have an agenda for change it is caught up in mechanisms of compliance
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at a number of levels. To employ modern political framing is thus inconsistent with the Nietzschean critique of Kant that Foucault carries into his work on the human sciences. The influence of Nietzschean issues does not abate in Foucault's later work. In The Use of Pleasure the second volume of History of Sexuality Nietzschean themes are at the forefront in the framing of his analysis and discussion. As with his other texts, he is pursuing themes relating to regulation. In a departure from earlier texts however, the location of his study is neither the modern nor the pre-modern. This time his genealogical interests have taken him to antiquity, to classical Greece. Theoretically this is an important move because it entails an exploration disconnected from the processes that Foucault has been associating with regulation. Not only are there none of the Christian practices of self-reflection and self-review such as the confessional but also there are none of the processes identified as operating out of and in conjunction with epistemology. The absence of the dividing practices, classification, definitional and disciplinary techniques, suggests that Foucault, as far as his own interests are concerned is making a theoretical move outside subjectivity. Using Nietzsche's framework, he is leaving behind that historical period associated with slave morality- that is, the Judeo - Christian tradition, its transfer into modern philosophy, and thereafter, into the human sciences. The move to take his observations outside epistemology could suggest that The Use of Pleasure involves a project not dissimilar to Nietzsche's search for 'beyond good and evil', that is, for the stance which would allow nobility. Such a reading gains initial credibility from the fact that Foucault sites his text amongst the Greek aristocracy, where nobility is actively sought and where considerable emphasis is placed on developing strength of character, on being wise in one's judgement and living with the harmony that belongs to beauty. We have here a number of the traits that Nietzsche associates with self-overcoming. Furthermore, and fairly persuasively, the ancient Greeks did not regard men having same sex relationships, including with boys, as transgressive. Theoretically then we are located in a period which does not use mechanisms of regulation associated with the onset of Christianity, rather, interpretation is generated within a context of the aesthetic, not the coding of transgression. The question arises then of whether or not for Foucault the aristocratic systems of the ancient Greeks stand as an example of a situation where people retain control over the conditions of judgement on terms which promote order but not regulation. Certainly many would draw that conclusion. I would argue, however, that such is not Foucault's intention. Rather, if The Use of Pleasure is read against Nietzsche we find an illustration not of nobility, or self-overcoming, but of mastery. In the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals one of the voices which Nietzsche is employing makes the association between 'the problem of man' and responsibility: 'The breeding of an animal that can promise- is not this just that very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to man? Is not this the very problem of man?' (GM:40) Nietzsche sees mastery as this point, where expectations consolidated that a man's nature be such that he would enter into and keep a promise. The processes involved generate two
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sets of effects: first, it activates ego, a sense of superiority amongst those who regard themselves as fitting the criteria; and second, corresponding representations of inferiority attributed to those who do not. The requirement that people shape themselves, do work on themselves, as a means of achieving some goal is identified by Nietzsche as a starting point for the self. It is of considerable theoretical importance, as we have seen, that the emergence of self is also the location for the production of division and hierarchy. For Nietzsche, the training in mastery is the context for creating 'resentment'. The regulatory processes adopted subsequently in the slave revolt, are those shaped originally in mastery, ie. in division, domination and resentment. The Use of Pleasure uncovers the way in which concerns about the management of sexuality operated similarly as a terrain of power that linked to both truth and to the self. Despite 'homosexuality' not being judged transgressive, by the ancient Greeks, it was not free of judgement. So while codification of the act typically belongs to the Christian, there was a considerable literature regarding the dangers of excess. Fears were regularly elaborated about the destructive consequences of uncontrolled passions on the capacity of men to rule with wisdom and diligence. Sex was seen to be natural but a trait shared with animals and therefore requiring subordination to the authority of reason and judgement: 'but the natural inferiority would not of itself be a reason for having to combat them, if there was not the danger that, winning out over all else, they would extend their rule over the whole individual, eventually reducing him to slavery' (UP:66). Thus 'homosexuality' itself was not problematised but the lack of control that might be produced by any liaison, including the homosexual was regarded as having the potential to undermine what did matter- the conduct appropriate to leadership. Thus Foucault sees 'care of the self' as 'a precondition that had to be met before one was qualified to attend to the affairs of others or lead them'. An ethical system regarding sex was elaborated which mirrored the aesthetic. In the absence of epistemological framing, an aesthetics of order, harmony and discipline prevailed. This 'aesthetics of existence' was' a way life whose moral value did not depend either on one's being in conformity with a code of behaviour, or on an effort of purification, but on certain formal principles in the use of pleasures, in the way one distributed them, in the limits one observed, in hierarchy one respected' (UP:89). Furthermore, the aesthetics of judgement did not preclude the development of a self. On the contrary, the aesthetic, insofar as it generated universalised, generalised criteria for the free, sovereign, male citizen, promoted the establishment of the self. AB with Nietzsche, it is in the expectation that one would be master to the slaves and women that proscription emerged: 'self-mastery and mastery of others were regarded as having the same form'. In both cases that domination was expressed in civil, legal and sexual terms. Again also, expectations required that relations complied with ethical calculations. And it was compliance with ethics that legitimised and heightened mastery. Under the ancients then, there was no Other of sexual transgression. Foucault points out however, that the later construction of the homosexual
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which followed upon the codification of the behaviours themselves, evolved out of the mechanisms put in place in antiquity. They operated as if in 'anticipation of future ethics ... the sign heralding a new sensibility' (UP: 150). By providing the criteria for judging some few as, first, selves to be trained and cultivated, and second, as thereby superior, sex provided the processes for making judgement which would evolve into resentment, and thereafter, Christianity and the human sciences. The knowledges associated with an ethics of asceticism thus used pleasure as a means of coding a self. The dominance I subordination that belonged to Greek aristocracy was an effect of and also operated through the power /knowledge of their ethical system. So the framing of the practice of living in aesthetic terms acted as a catalyst for the production of truths of living: 'One could not form oneself as an ethical subject in the use of pleasures without forming oneself at the same time as a subject of knowledge' (UP:86). Those truths in turn become the grounds of division. The Use ofPleasure thus attempts from another direction to identify the most basic components which make up the architecture of regulation. By examining those components as they began to emerge in antiquity, Foucault has removed some of the sources of confusion that have surrounded his work and been a pronounced feature of his legacy. What remains is an argument about the effects of pursuing the truth of the self (later to be framed epistemologically), of subjectivity as mastery, and its influence as a force for domination and subordination that can mobilise judgement in terms that divide and then construct an Other of exclusion. Foucault'scritiqueisthusdirectedtowardanyprocesseswhichhaveastheir effect the separating out of a self. Like Nietzsche, he observes that the conditions which generate a separate self include social expectations of authority and control, linked to status and esteem, and deployed through some exercise of power /knowledge. The text, therefore, is a significant contribution toward the realisation of Foucault's goal of making it possible for people to see that things can be different. It seems relatively clear that liberal democracy, rather than offering an alternative, promises more of the same. Its tendency to differentiation, which is being given theoretical emphasis in Foucauldian readings, maintains and even heightens the importance of self-responsibility with its mechanisms for displacing people's own knowledges, replacing them with externally derived criteria of judgement and shaping a self on those terms. The fact of pluralism does not eliminate the regulatory processes out of which liberal democracy produces the self. The rational, calculating, disciplined and defined self is an effect of the early bourgeois coupling of freedom and order. Power /knowledge inscribes itself on body and soul but insofar as liberal politics is concerned, its most privileged terrain appears to be where both are combined, that is, the self. Further, epistemological framing of the subject as an object of knowledge increases as differentiation proliferates the divisions between people. Thus as identity becomes more closely bounded by contrasts, such as that between gay and straight, black and white, male and female, the unitary categories that are generated defeat the objective of identity politics which is to promote difference. To use a Nietzschean/Foucauldian observation: they continue the pattern of pro-
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ducing their opposite. Despite the very best intentions then, insofar as they take on the techniques of mastery, the political strategies which are deployed suggest an up-dated version of the 'slave revolt'. At the same time, the literature suggests that there are areas where an alternative dynamic is operating. For instance in the sphere of sexual politics there has been a relatively recent critique surfacing of the gay /lesbian position which has insisted on the importance of linking issues of sexuality to epistemology. This has been a catalyst for an opening up of a series of new moves around political strategy. The gay movement and the more recently declared 'queer nation', share political objectives around resistance to the marginalisation of homosexuality as excluded and demonic Other. After that however, their projects diverge. The gay movement is largely associated with the assertion of difference on the basis of rights assumptions: that people have the right to be accepted regardless of sexual preference. The queer nation reads that implicit desire to become part of the mainstream as a form of cooptation. In contrast, they identify as 'queer' ie. with the transgressive, and as 'nation', as separate and autonomous. Both gays and the queer nation make identity a crucial part of their politics. However as Cindy Patton argues with regard to gays: 'the engagement required to gain minute rights simultaneously bestows identity and constrains marginal difference'. It is those constraints which she argues, the queer nation rejects in its formulation of itself in terms of 'performances of oppositional identity which state their difference' (Patton 1993). That location of identity in performance is an important move, both politically and theoretically for it entails a refusal to be the individuals or subjects of liberal, Western, homosexuality. Instead identity belongs to 'nation' as a collective, formulated through collective alliance. It also moves the political away from acting subjects to the performative ... to what people do rather than who they are. In contrast with Nietzsche's self-overcoming, therefore, a new resolution is being sought in which identity, now decentred and fragmented, is constructed out of action rather than an object. Yet as we have seen, Foucault in The Use of Pleasure is pointing out that a difficulty remains with any framing which is used as the basis to construct knowledge of the self. The self which is produced may well be defined as unfixed and changing, but as identity it remains constituted as a discrete self, and therefore bound up in distinction, opposition and mastery. Nevertheless, the argument in the literature is that unstable representations like Madonna as 'gay icon' are introducing into popular culture a new uncertainty in regard to the bounded categories of the modern. Certainly that seems an accurate reading insofar as the unitary definitions of sex and gender delivered in mainstream popular culture are concerned. However there is an increasingly influential view, informed by the work of Barthes, that what is delivered is not necessarily that which is received. Studies by John Fiske, E. Ann Kaplan and Meagan Morris amongst others, have made central contributions to marking out some of the distinctions between the two.
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For the purposes of this paper it is important to note that embedded within that distinction is the emergence of animplicitrecognition of both the complexity of the audience, and the context in which its responses are located. I would argue further that if, using the work of de Certeau, we shift our focus across to the whole of everyday life, we find a location where techniques have long been operating that have placed limits on modernist framing, that have resisted displacement, and have been a location for the preservation of people's own cultural responses. Seen from this perspective, everyday life can be regarded as having an oppositional capacity, for it provides a site where at least some of Nietzsche's 'immoralist' values can be seen tohavea place, thatis,movementratherthanform, the deedratherthan the doer, the verb rather than the noun, the Dionysian rather than the Apollonian. It thus also suggests a sphere where the performative operates without the constraints imposed by attempts to use it as a source for establishing identity. Michel de Certeau sees his project as an attempt to bring to light the 'models of action' characteristic of the users of culture. His argument is that the processes of consumption generate ways of reworking the culture so that it more nearly fits people's own interests, values and traditions. He examines the way in which those processes have shaped both imposed colonial cultures and also the culture of the contemporary West, documenting the extent to which the dominant, delivered, culture is 'subject to innumerable small transformations' which adapt it to people's own ways of thinking and living. The tactics which de Certeau uncovers can be regarded as political for two reasons: first, they are the means by which the weak resist the strong; and second, they provide an alternative logic, that is, 'a way of thinking is invested in a way of acting'. de Certeau is describing 'an art of practice' in which the dominant culture of form is reshaped through use into practice. Formal, imposed culture is repositioned as a resource for use in everyday life. Further, the processes involved in the usurping of hegemonic culture put in place an alternative to epistemological framing. Thus the art of practice is a counter-discourse to power /knowledge. Rather than the Will to Truth stipulating both an actor and thereafter, an action, everyday life appears to reverse the process. When thought is located within practice, not only are the doer and the deed inseparable but the framing and position of knowledge as an object is dismantled. Thought belongs to and takes its character from specific, conditional, contested, even contradictory locations. It is not then that there are simply no pretensions regarding universals or truth, but that the requirements involved in requisitioning and reworking dominant culture entails processes which replace the noun with the verb that is opposition is located within use. Thus creative cultural practices, as an expression of the performative, act independently of attempts to frame them as problems of knowledge. And as we have seen, with no Truth to strive for, the expectations of a sovereign self are seriously limited. Conditional, heterogeneous, conflictual knowledges emerging out of practice are more likely to produce a self that mirrors it- a Nietzschean self in which one is in a process of becoming.
j'oucau{t, PoCitics and tlie Peiformative
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Support for de Certeau's interpretation can be found in recent developments in the deployment of popular culture. Popular culture has consistently placed emphasis on the experience, the event, the new and the transgressive, that is, the' carnival' rather than on the discovery of meaning. Contemporary cultural formations appear to be linking into, and strengthening that tradition. Technology, design and marketing have generated an explosion in the number of forms available for experiencing the event. The interest in expanding the range of experience can now be pursued thorough music, video games, recreational drugs,life style, fashion, sport, film, virtual reality, etc. The heightening of experience also takes place through the spectacle offered by department stores, discos, shopping centers, clubs, fun parks, or amusement centers, where the modernist distinction between real and imaginary is broken down. In addition, the transgressive dimensions of the popular get more space in horror films, X-rated videos, cable television and home made videos. It is possible to observe in that overall strengthening, a return of public culture to the centred position from which it was marginalised by the modern. The taming of excitement and excess, of the carnivalesque or Dionysian, by modern processes appears to be being undermined by a renewed interest in an unmediated experience of doing. Everyday life thus itself features a shift away from knowing to the performative. These changes can consequently be seen to be reconstituting ordinary life as a field of creativity for experimentation, for challenging limits. Running alongside that has been a further and parallel exposure of the illusions of knowledge. Thus the certainties offered by epistemology are becoming increasingly fragmented and unstable. Intransigent issues around the economy, the environment, health and poverty are themselves deconstructing modernity by exposing its myths. This strengthening of public culture suggests not only a victory of doing over knowledge but also of the popular over the elite and the bourgeois. The fragmentation of authorised codes and their replacement with a diverse mix of expressions reverses the homogenising impulse of the modern which was bourgeois in character. Heterogeneity opens up the space of non-authorised readings of cultural preferences which become the thing in itself, no longer carrying the burden of extraneous meaning or purpose. However, the sharpening profile of the performative aspects of everyday life does not speak of the emergence of a new politics. Rather it is important to affirm Baudrillard's observation that the sphere of images and experiences is proliferating. The terms of the strengthening of popular culture are thereby displacing epistemology. The surfeit of activity itself pushes the limits of modernist knowledges as it stretches the classificatory capacity of reason. From this direction then, diversity, variance and multi-dimensionality can be seen to resist the encoding process and undermine the operation of power /knowledge. And when this new instability in delivered images intersects with the local and specific practices of the everyday, the dismantling the coherent and unitary can be seen to accelerate. In conclusion, the formulation of a political project around liberal democracy is based on the same principles as those valued by the ancient Greeks:
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citizenship, self-regulation, the public sphere and ... mastery. Foucault's work both critiques such a move and explores the conditions of possibility for an alternative. Consideration of the performative suggests that independence and autonomy already exists in people's lives: not in sovereignty but in resistance. Paradoxically, it is in that aspect of life formerly categorised as 'low culture' where the crucial combination of creativity and judgement are being located. Thus not only does everyday life appear to supplant epistemology, subjectivity and the disciplinary knowledges, but more importantly, provides the sphere where it becomes possible to recognise the 'political' as an art of practice, as self-overcoming.
Bibliography Ansell-Pearson, K. (1991 ). Nietzsche contra Rousseau, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. de Certeau, M. (1986). Heterologies: Discourses on the Other, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1978). Spurs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1967). Madness and Civilization, London: Tavistock. (Referred to as MC in the text). __ _, (1975). Discipline and Punish, London: Allen Lane. __ _, (1976). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, New York: Random House. __ _, (1983). 'Structuralism and Poststructuralism: An Interview' with Gerard Raulet, Telos 55, Spring, pp.195-211. __ _, (1984). The Use of Pleasure, London: Viking (Referred to as UP in the text). Jay, M. (1993). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkley: University of California Press. Held, D. (1993). 'Liberalism, Marxism and democracy', Theory and Society, April, 22, p.2. Kaufman, W. (1971). The Portable Nietzsche, London: Chatto and Windus. Koelb, C. (ed.) (1990). Nietzsche as Postmodernist, New York: The State University of New York Press. Patton, C. (1993). 'Embodying Subaltern Memory: Kinesthesia and the Problematics of Gender and Race' in Schwichtenberg, C. (ed.) The Madonna Connection, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Patton, P. (1993). Nietzsche, Feminism, and Politics, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil, New York: Modern Books.
__ _,The Genealogy of Morals, New York: Modern Books (Referred to as BGE in the text).
__ _, Twilight of the Idols (Referred to as TI in the text). __ _, The Gay Science (Referred to as GS in the text). Schwichtenberg, C. (ed.) (1993). The Madonna Connection, Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
The Subject of Foucault !Micliae{Janover Foucault's fundamental idea is that of a dimension of subjectivity derived from power and knowledge without being dependent on them.! A centred self once again became a possibility, only now the self was understood in historical-social terms, not in ontological ones. Position 1 of the 1960s (which Foucault was later to call'archaeology') was a critique of the self as rationalist by a strategy of reversal: madness vs. reason. Position 2 of the 1970s (which Foucault was to call 'genealogy') was a critique of the self as centred consciousness by a strategy of displacement: the locus of intelligibility shifted from subject to structure. Position 3 of the 1980s (which Foucault was to call 'ethics') was a hermeneutics of the self using a strategy of historicism: the emphasis fell on the activity of self-constitution in discursive practices.2
We begin with two statements concerning the significance of the late researches and writings of Michel Foucault. The first statement by Deleuze is succinct and carefully phrased: subjectivity is 'derived from' but is not 'dependent on' power and knowledge. The second passage from Mark Poster is far more general in its historical sweep and in its imprecision. We could criticise elements of the description of every one of the 'positions' he graphs for us. The work of the 1960s is reduced to Madness and Civilisation the work of the 1970s is summed up without mention of the relations of power and knowledge which are its key contents. The work of the 1980s is misconceived as a 'hermeneutics of the self', this being for Foucault but one local and late variation (in Christian practices of self-decipherment and confession) of the longer 'history of morals' in early and late antiquity.3 Yet Poster's summary of Foucault's theoretical itinerary does sum up a drift of concerns, to which Deleuze also more concisely alludes, that Foucault too recognised in his writings and suggested to readers that they treat as a map of his work: Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, an historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, an historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, an historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents. So, three axes are possible for genealogy. All three were present, albeit in a somewhat confused fashion, in Madness and Civilisation. The truth axis was studied in The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things. The power axis was studied in Discipline and Punish, and the ethical axis in The History of Sexuality. 4
I would like to suggest that a rigorous critique of notions of founding subjectivity is a feature of Foucault's writing from Madness and Civilisation (1961) to The Care of the Self (1984). This much is, I think, uncontentious and my remarks on the critique of subjectivity in Foucault are aimed more at
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emphasising the extent to which the last writings reassert a critique of any notion of foundational or unified subjectivity than establishing the roots of, what Deleuze calls, Foucault's 'cold and concerted destruction of the subject'5 in his earlier texts. Against Poster's claim that the Foucault of Position 3 launches a 'hermeneutics of the self' as opposed to the 'critique of self' common to Positions 1 and 2, and that '[i]n this last phase of Foucault's theory of the subject one senses a return of sorts to the problematic of Sartre and the existentialists',6 I argue that a critique of the self is common to all of Foucault'sworkandthatareturntotheSartreanauthenticsubjectandethics of commitment is not on the agenda for Foucault. Yet in another, perhaps a stronger sense, I am in agreement with Poster and others, such as Habermasl who have seen in Foucault's research of the 1980s an open-ended yet clearly-present renegotiation of the heritage of the Enlightenment. This reconsideration of the positive critical tradition of modernity involves Foucault in a wider rendering of the autonomy of the subject as actor and thinker despite the limitations of discursive and nondiscursive practices which still surround and in some measure permeate and constitute the subject. I am not arguing for the existence of a deep zone of impermeable subjectivity. Rather, I want to suggest that subjectivity is best regarded as being no zone or space at all but an exercise or a practice of sorts. Moreover, subjectivity is an ineliminable and ultimately irreducible exercise which bears analysis on its own terrain. Paraphrasing what Foucault holds to be true of freedom, the guarantee of subjectivity is, and can only be, subjectivity itself. s The conditions of emergence of a dynamic notion of subjectivity, as an exercise of the self, are modern and Western. The idea that we can act, think, live differently, eccentrically with regard to the patterns of life of others is a post-Enlightenmentheritageofours. 9 Itcanbe,andfrequentlyis,anillusion. We might firmly believe that we are being different, eccentric, uniquely ourselves, original, when our individuality is most evidently (to all but ourselves) branded as a mime or a reflex of discourses, institutions, forces. But the possibility of being mistaken about this and with it the possibility of launching a wholesale critique of the idea that we ever really are anything other than complex interplays of mime and reflex - the possibility of a decentring critique of all subjectivity- these are possibilities which crucially depend upon the historical emergence of the notion of subjectivity as the exercise of ourselves upon ourselves. Gilles Deleuze has suggested, with reference to Foucault's late writings, that subjectivity- the relation to oneself -can be defined most generally as 'the affect of self by self, folded force'.1° This, I think, is insightful, yet it is also true that this general formula itself is conceivable only since the end of the eighteenth century. It may be, as Deleuze speculates, that the appearance of such 'folded force'- subjectivity -'can seem unique to Western development'.11 Whether this is true or not, it is highly likely that the articulation of, and reflection on, subjectivity is a recent development in European thought substantially present only since the Enlightenment. More particularly, could it be that the modern search for the sources of the self, of which Foucault's 'historical ontology of ourselves' is but one in-
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stance, depends upon a certain withdrawal from the self and upon a postulation of some Other which so distances the European Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment self-images of Reason, Morality, Man, or History, as to open to question the very identity and constitution of the self invested by these images? An early postulation of Otherness which corrodes the verities of its time, and makes space for the theories and histories of subjectivity, might be located in the Romantic critique of Enlightenment. The endless irony of the German Romantics at the turn of the nineteenth centuryisacaseinpoint. 'World-irony',asHeinrichHeinecharacterisedit,12 sets up a kind of perpetuum mobile of the subject in which the self is set at odds to itself in such a way as to prevent the simple recuperation of the self at a higher note upon a pre-given scale of self-identity. Instead, the unremitting alterity of endless possibility throws all the scales into doubt: memory, sobriety, sanity, love, knowledge, all the familiar registers of identity are destabilised in the play of irony, and they can even crumble altogether. Against Hegel's consonance of subject as universal spirit, now stands Holderlin's dissonance of both spirit and subject in the 'withdrawal of the gods' and the poet's collapse into madness. My contention is that Foucault's critique of the self, is aimed always at the magisterial illusions of subjectivity- Man, Reason, History, Duty- not at the exercise of subjectivity, the folded force of self affecting self, which we can see exemplified in the counterpoint of self against self in German Romantic irony. Foucault's 'critical ontology of ourselves' 13 sets us at odds with ourselves, but this is not to discomfit subjectivity since subjectivity is exercised most actively through alterity for Foucault too. Paradoxically, it is only by standing to the side of ourselves that we can become ourselves. There may well be a Faustian echo here: the moment we rest contented with ourselves we are lost, only in motion do we find ourselves. Or, in Foucault's terms: 'To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration'. 14 It is because Foucault was himself a self-conscious modern setting his investigation, and his posture toward the present in that space between Kant and Baudelaire that his 'historical ontology of ourselves' in antiquity and modernity can be accomplished with such vigour and such passion. The tensile force-field which he constructs between the' aesthetics of existence'15 of late antiquity and the 'work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves' 16 in the present is not the resultant of research from which the subject has been exorcised or reduced to the status of a mere target of historical dissection. Rather, it is the fact that subjectivity is exercised and affirmed through alterity which explains Foucault's fascination with classical antiquity and early Christianity as alternative currents to, and archaeological ruins beneath, our modern understandings of ethics, sexuality, and ourselves. And it is because, for him, subjectivity is exercised through alterity that he can think that our task as modern subjects is 'not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are' .17 It is in such a refusal that subjectivity is exercised; we do not say or stay what we are, but we become what we might be. For Foucault, subjectivity is very much like the 'negative capability' or 'poetical
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character' of John Keats. As Keats says: 'a thing per se and stands alone; it is not itself; it has no self- it is everything and nothing. It has no character; it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated... the poet has no identity'.18 Reading Foucault is to encounter a sustained assault upon the imperiousness of philosophy and of all those 'human sciences' which implore us to seek, or tell us where to find, a constitutive source of our universal subjectivity. In his earliesttexts Foucault seems to be proffering a kind of surrealist critique of rationalism in which it is precisely the experience of Unreason that offers us a glimpse of a constitutive source. Here in texts like Mental Illness and Psychology he urged that we 'be ready for the great tragic confrontation with madness' 19 and saw in it 'access to the natural truth of man'. 20 EveninMadnessandCivilisation,theworkhewouldlaterclasswithin the first axis of the genealogy of ourselves, the rhetoric of inversion and the privileging of raw experience as the innocence of Reason suggests that we attain to a kind of truth about ourselves through the 'sovereign enterprise of unreason'. 21 In invocations of the liminal tragic figures of madness and art fused - Holderlin, Goya, Sade, Nietzsche, Nerval, Roussel, Artaud - that stretch from the early text on mental illness, through Madness and Civilisation to The Order ofThings and into the essays of the 1960s and early 1970s, we find not so much a critique of constitutive subjectivity as a counter-constitution: a deconstitutive subjectivity composed of Dionysian fragments of excess, transfiguration, disorder, unreason and death. Such a deconstitutive subjectivity of necessity teeters on the brink of dissolution in Foucault's elegiac essays on Blanchot's 'thinking from outside',22 on Bataille's transgressions23 which explode thought and being into a kaleidoscope of multiple experiences; and on Deleuze's 'Theatrum Philosophicum' which promises, like LSD, a release into acategorical thinking- 'a mobile, asymmetrical, decentred, spiraloid ... swarming of phantasm-events'.24 Foucault's attack upon the rational, centred, and steady conception of subjectivity begins in these writings and might best be emblematised in Foucault's celebration of the 'death of Man' as the 'unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think'. 25 However, we might note that Foucault opposed the republication of Mental Illness and Psychology26 and that he distanced himself more and more from the attempts in Madness and Civilisation and The Order of Things to recapture for thought and life a zone 'below the level of representation',27 John Rajchman has aptly written of the pursuit of a 'modernist sublime'28 in Foucault's early hopes for a 'thought that stands outside subjectivity29 and for transgressions of language and experience which would herald 'the shattering of the philosophical subject'. 30 It is this modernist sublime, the lyrical challenge to represent the unrepresentable or think the unthought, which drops out of Foucault's writing from The Archaeology of Knowledge on. 31 But the ambition of provoking a thinking to the side of the wellordered, rational subject of knowledge and of moral action, remains alive in Foucault. It is this passionate antagonism to the conventional subject(s) of philosophy - universal, rational, synthetic and recollective - which drives Foucault's later less lyrical but equally forceful critique of subjectivity.
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In Discipline and Punish32 the poetics of deconstituted subjectivity are displaced by the genealogy of the 'fabrication of the disciplinary individual'.33 Through a careful charting of knowledges, technologies, discourses and strategies of numerous kinds of social organisational reformfrom penology to psychology and from the standards of military drill to the teaching of handwriting- Foucault gives us a book that truly does 'serve as a historical background to various studies of the power of normalisation and the formation of knowledge in modern society'. 34 Of course, this modest statement of aims sells the book far short. It is a tour de force of sustained analysis and implicit, but raging, critique of the historical substitution wherein judicial torture and public scaffolds are replaced by the routinisation of disciplines (pun intended: these are simultaneously grids of knowledge and of power), surveillance and normalised behaviour. The bitter irony in Foucault'sbookstemsfromhisperceptionthatallofthisinnovationinforms of control is usually treated as humanisation, and progress. In one of his diaries, Elias Canetti writes: 'Cruel punishments back then, mass murder today'. 35 Some of the same gloomy but honest consideration of our present informs Foucault's Discipline and Punish. It is this same honesty that presses Foucault to question whether the constitution of subjectivity itself might be not a haven in a heartless world but a construction of 'processes of individualisation ... that are one of the effects of the new tactics of power'. 36 Discipline and Punish takes as one of its generat methodological rules the notion that penal law and human science are not separate, if overlapping, domains but are rather joined in a' common matrix'. Technology of power thus becomes 'the very principle both of humanisation of the penal system and of the knowledge of man'. 37 Moreover, this questioning of the bases and functions of knowledge reaches beyond a critical analysis of the self-reflection of the human sciences toward a doubt whether the very ideas of our interiority and individuality might be contrivances effected by the modern dispositifs of power and knowledge: 'Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this dominationobservation'.38 The criticat ironic thread which rejects or, at the least, severely doubts the assurances, hopes and ideals of humanism and interior subjectivity continued toinformFoucault's thoughtrightto the end. WithitsrootsinHeidegger and Nietzsche, as well as in the genealogical histories of modern power and knowledge, the assault on the myth of man is as vigorous in 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1984 as it was in Discipline and Punish in 1975, or in The Order of Things in 1966. And along with the collective subject man, the individual subject as rational knower and deliberative actor is subtly undermined. In its place, Foucault puts only a deliberately cool scepticism about all our deeds, decisions and thoughts a scepticism which amounts to what he calls a 'permanent critique of ourselves'. 39 In The Use of Pleasure Foucault fleshed in the historical background to the questionofwhatitmeans,whatmustbealreadyinplace,foruseventothink of an enterprise like a' critique of ourselves'. He suggests that in studying the genealogy of subjectivity we should distinguish moral codes - systems of
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rules, norms, taboos and mechanisms or personnel who might inculcate, oversee and enforce them - from the province of ethics which is concerned not with the code of norms but with 'the way in which individuals are urged to constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct... the models proposed for setting up and developing relationships with the self'. 40 Self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, self-decipherment, self-transformationall of these are matters of ethics in the sense of ethoi or forms of life. These are all contingent historical modalities of relation to the self that need not always exist, that can be organised differently from society to society, time to time. In this work Foucault was no longer involved in a critique, of the subject, but in a tentative elaboration of the conditions of possibility for the existence of subjectivity, or its non-existence and for its differentiated forms. These are not transcendental conditions of possibility but take the form of what we might call the historical a priori41 of the techniques of 'subjectivisation'. 42 Such techniques of subjectivisation (modalities by which individuals constitute themselves as moral subjects) are not positivistic applications of tools and tactics, or operations of apparatuses of power-knowledge upon bodies. There is in Foucault's last writings and remarks a strong sense of the reflexivity of the field of subjectivity which precludes any such positivistic, or quasi-mechanistic, understandings of the historical processes involved here. Instead, Foucault speaks of various problematisations of the self as subject, various ways in which the subject might be constituted as an object for thought (for itsel£):43 What I wanted to know was how the subject constituted himself in such and such a determined form, as a mad subject or as a normal subject, though a certain number of practices which were games of truth, applications of power, etc. I had to reject a certain a priori theory of the subject in order to make this analysis ...44
The historical interest in the forms of the subject might well be seen to grow out of the earlier genealogical interest of Foucault in individuation through normalisation. It was, after all, through his research into the character and genesis of modern sexuality that Foucault was faced with the question of how the sexual subject of desire is constituted historically. 45 However, in the later two volumes of The History of Sexuality project, published some eight years after the first, the historical interest in dispositifs of individuation is joined to a sharper philosophical focus on' self-formation as an" ethical subject'". 46 It is here, in the arena of' self-formation' (is it going too far to see parallels here to the idea of Bildung in German Idealist and Romantic thought of the early nineteenth century?) that Foucault expresses an intellectual and a personal interest in the 'aesthetics of existence'. 47 The arts of living can be studied with reference to the ancient Greek 'moral problematisation of pleasures48, or through a thinking upon the modern tasks of an 'ascetic elaboration of the self'. 49 In one of his most thoughtprovoking essays, 'What Is Enlightenment?', Foucault suggests that the Baudelairean 'asceticism of the dandy who makes of his own body, his behaviour, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art' 50 is to be adopted as the quintessential'attitude of modernity'. 51 We cannot but be struck by the parallel of this conception of modernity and the work that
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Foucault produced at precisely this time on pre-Christian, Greek and Roman forms of 'cultivation of the sel£'.52 That the ethical attitudes of antiquity and modernity should converge at the point where an aesthetics of existence is articulated upon a practice of freedom is no coincidence. This is precisely the motivated convergence of the interest in the present of Michel Foucault near the end of his life. From antiquity to Christianity, we pass from a morality that was essentially the search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rules. And if I was interested in antiquity it was because ... the idea of a morality as obedience is now disappearing, has already disappeared. And to this absence of morality corresponds, must correspond, the search for an aesthetics of existence.53
Foucault suffered no illusions about the glorious beauties or human heights of antiquity. Asked if he found the Greeks'admirable', his response was a flat 'No'. Explaining his distaste for their moral and social world he remarks that the ancient Greeks were torn, 'between the relentless search for a certain style of existence on the one hand and the effort to make it available to all on the other'.54 One wonders, here, whether this is a contradiction perceived by the Greeks of antiquity or by the modern social and political activist, Foucault. Mocking his own fascination for that ancient style of existence Foucault avows that '[a]ll of antiquity seems to me to have been a 'profound error". Yet, despite these doubts, antiquity and modernity are ultimately affirmed as belonging together because neither can believe that ethics is founded in religion nor in any normative code of laws at all.55 Some classicists have argued that Foucault does not accurately chart the terrain of the ancient Greek or Roman moral worlds.56 It is certainly the case that Foucault's double recognition of the always contingent practices of freedom in both antiquity and modernity provides a perfect reflection of his own ethico-political thinking in the present. His is a thought that values 'practices of the self' above'systems of morality',57 and which sets the 'undefined work of freedom'58 against the normativity of, and normalisations to, any particular code of rules and prohibitions. Do we find, finally, in the coincidence of the research into the heautou epimeleisthai (care for onesel£)59 in antiquity with the pondering of the question of askesis (exercise on onesel£)60 as the life of philosophy today, a return of Foucault's earlier 'modernist sublime'?61 I think the answer to this question must be 'no', but a qualified no. The fundamental impulse of the early essays on Bataille, Blanchot and Klossowski, to break thought free from the 'dynasty of representation'62 remained central to Foucault's later genealogical work. But Foucault came to see that the power of the regime of ordered forms, conventional topoi and logics of the same, cannot be shattered through language experiments, nor even through experiments in transgression as urged by Sade or Bataille. Such experiments frequently feed back into the loops of power which they set out to sever, and their liminal voyages into transcendent madness or self-dissolution often merely throw into relief the continued dominance of codes of Reason, Man, and Identity. The line between critical consciousness and tragic experience which seems
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to inform Madness and Civilisation in its approach to the 'sovereign experience' of Unreason, and to recur in the liminal figures of art/madness invoked in The Order of Things, is not a line that can be crossed simply by crossing out critical reason. Appeals to the saving power of excess, transgression, madness, or to the 'nakedexperienceoflanguage'63 arenotfoundinFoucault'sworkafter1972. Yet these experiments in crossing over from philosophy to experience, from familiar order to strange disorder, remained central as models in Foucault's own thinking. It was, he said, through reading Blanchot and Bataille that he had first discovered Nietzsche in the context of pursuing 'a way out of phenomenology'. 64 They provided more than a way out of this particular philosophy of subjectivity as interior self-consciousness. 'For me Nietzsche, Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski were ways of escaping from philosophy' 65 ways of crossing 'the frontier between the philosophical and the nonphilosophical'.66 This escape from the confines of pure philosophy, this frontier crossing, remained a prime motive of Foucault's thought. Moreover it was a characteristic of his sense of the project of an intellectual as being one who constantly questions the boundaries of his /her own work and thought. 67 If Foucault draws back from the explicitness, the high decibel output, of the modernist sublime in its heralding of transgression and dissolution of self; might it be apt to find in his later work a modernist minimalism, modernism sotto voce as it were? This does seem to make good sense of his intellectual 'ethic of constant disengagement'. 68 The 'straying afield of himself', 69 which he counsels the thinker, is a kind of canny hybrid of the obliteration of the limits of the self, and the scepticism that questions these attempts to break the self utterly away from the self. We can take Foucault's relation to Baudelaire as an example of this hybrid between the absolute transgression of the limits of subjectivity and the equivocal scepticism as to subjectivity and transgression of its limits. Baudelaire is presented to us, by Foucault, as an 'indispensable example' 70 of the 'attitude of modernity'; 71 'attitude' is defined as 'a mode of relating to contemporary reality ... a way of thinking and feeling ... [a] bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos'. 72 The man (for Baudelaire always a man and always an artist) who exhibits the attitude of modernity both sees to the core of modernity and wishes and imagines it otherwise, according to Foucault. And the modern, or modernist, establishes a relation to himself which is 'tied to an indispensable asceticism'. 73 'Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not "liberate man in his own being"; it compels him to face the task of producing himself'.74 Now, this depiction of the necessary asceticism of moderns in their work of self-elaboration is, of course, the root and nerve of Foucault's own philosophical ethos of permanent critique of our era and of ourselves. If this critical reflection on our present is linked in turn, as Foucault links it, to an historicised rendering of Kant's idea of critique it might even lead to areinvigorated 'faith in Enlightenment'. 75 Taken together with Foucault's statements that 'philosophy is precisely the challenging of all phenomena of domination?6 and that a philosophical ethos joins together critique of
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ourselves, historical analysis of limits imposed on us and experiments with surpassing these limits,77 we arrive at the following conclusion. The intellectual work of self-transformation, which is 'something rather close to the aesthetic experience' 78 and carries a resonance of the pre-Christian arts of existence, is to be simultaneously a form of historico-political critique and experiment in practical political as well as individual, change. 79 This might provide the outline of a modernism in which aestheticist concern with bending one's subjectivity into new shapes is fused with contingent political critique of shapes of domination. But it must leave Foucault a voyage away from Baudelaire. This we might think a good thing but it is a problem for Foucault who has taken Baudelaire as the model for his own attitude of modernity. In fact, the 'dandy'- the epitome of modern life- that Foucault takes from Baudelaire is not wholly Baudelaire's, or ratherisnotallofBaudelaire'sdandy.Forthepoethimself,thedandyisonly partially the stoic workman upon his own self, dandies are also characterised by a degree of self-absorption that seems foreign to Foucault's modernistethos. According to Baudelaire, 'these beingshaveno other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking'.so Self-transformation, is the common element in the transgressive modernist sublime, in Baudelaire's modernist aestheticism, and in Foucault's own modernist asceticism. Foucault's modernism finally declines the apocalyptic visions of transfiguration of the subject which characterise Sade's, Bataille's, and, in part, Nietzsche's thought. The combination of self-reflection, self-criticism, and self-detachment in Foucault's later thought might even be compared to the martial and melancholic turning upon the self that can be found in the paradigmatic modernist-minimalist Franz Kafka: 'but every day at least one line should be trained on me, as they now train telescopes on comets'. 81 Like Kafka, Foucault shrinks the subject down by taking distance, in Foucault's case historical distance, from it. This is the key to the subject of Foucault, it is seen true when seen from afar, through comparisons to other types of the folding of self back upon itself, and by contrast to types of existence in which such folding might be altogether absent. Of course, setting Foucault beside Kafka like this is only a pointer to the character of Foucault's modernism. Any strong comparison between them would founder (even though there is perhaps one other point of comparison in their Nietzschean figurations of punishment as an apparatus of memory and knowledge). Only a philosopher, like Foucault, could suggest that 'ethics is the deliberate form assumed by freedom'. 82 There is in the very expression and terms of this statement, a degree of abstraction and of hope that Kafka would eschew. Where they meet is in the elaboration of the subject as a continuing exercise of self-scrutiny and self-detachment. For Foucault, at least, this means that subjectivity is an exercise and not a space or a being. It is engaged most fully through alterity, through thinking otherwise than one's habits, surrounding practices and even one's own ideals, might indicate. Might we say, paraphrasing Foucault's own pithy formulation of ethics, that the subject, of Foucault, is the deliberate form assumed by transformation (or otherness)? And, hence, that transformation
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(otherness) is the ontological condition of the subject. The subject of Foucault then exists in so far as it is a creature of metamorphosis. 1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8
G. Deleuze (1988). Foucault, trans. S. Hand; London: Athlone Press, p.101. M. Poster (1993). 'Foucault and the Problem of Self-Constitution', in J. Caputo and M. Yount (eds), Foucault and the Critique of Institutions, Pennsylvania State University Press, p.64. Foucault refers to his 'general framework of the book about sex', as a 'history of morals' in H. Dreyfus andP. Rabinow (eds) (1983). 'On the Genealogy of Ethics'. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, p.237. [Hereafter, this book will be referred to as BSH.] BSH, p.237. G. Deleuze, 1988, p.55. M. Poster, 1993, p.65. J. Habermas, 'Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present', in D.C. Hoy (ed.) (1986). Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp.103-4. ' ... "liberty" is what must be exercised ... The guarantee of freedom is freedom'. M. Foucault, 'Space, Knowledge, Power' (1983) in P. Rabinow (ed.) (1986). The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin, p.245. [Hereafter this book is referred to as
TFR.] 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19
20 21 22
I am endebted here to C. Taylor (1991). The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. G. Deleuze, 1988, p.104. Ibid, p.106. See E. Behler, 'The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism', in F. Garber (ed.) (1988). Romantic Irony, Budapest, p.46. M. Foucault, 'What Is Enlightenment?', in TFR, p.47. Ibid, p.41. M. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley, London: Penguin, 1987, p.89. [Hereafter this book will be referred to as UP.] Cf. M. Foucault, 'An Aesthetics of Existence' (1984) in Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, L. Kritzman (ed.) (1888) London: Routledge, 1988, pp.47-54. [Hereafter this book will be referred to as PPC. ] TFR, p.47. BSH, p.216. M. Forman (ed.) (1947). The Letters of John Keats, 3rd edn, London: OUP, p.227. M. Foucault (1987). Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. A. Sheridan; Berkeley, University of California Press, p.75. This text translates Maladie mentale et psychologie (Paris, 1962) which itself is a revised edition of Foucault's first book Maladie mentale et personalite (Paris, 1954). Ibid, p.74. Foucault(1965).Madnessand Civilization, trans. R. Howard; New York: Pantheon Books, p.278. In his 1966 essay on Blanchot, 'Thought from the Outside', in Foucault/ Blanchot, New York: Zone Books, 1987 Foucault suggests that this thinking, born of traditions of mysticism and negative theology, takes us to 'the void that serves as [thought's] site' (p.16). In his 1963 homage to Bataille, Foucault had taken up Blanchot's 'principle of contestation' whereby the subject is probed enabling thought to reach an 'empty core where being achieves its limit and where the limit defines being'. ('A Preface to Transgression', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, D. F. Bouchard, (ed.) (1977) and trans., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p.36. See on both Foucault and Blanchot, A. Stoekl (1992). Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity and the Performance in Twentieth Century French Tradition, University of Nebraska Press, chs. 6 and7.
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23 'Perhaps one day [the experience of transgression] will seem as decisive for our culture, as much part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was of an earlier time for dialectical thought'. M. Foucault,'A Preface to Transgression', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 1977 p.33. 24 M. Foucault, 'Theatrum Philosophicum', in ibid, p.190. 25 M. Foucault (1970). The Order of Things, New York: Vintage Books, p.342. [Hereafter this book will be referred to as OT. ] 26 The history of the changes from Maladie mentale et personalite (1954) to Maladie mentale et psychologic (1962), and of Foucault's opposition to further reissuing of either text is told by Hubert Dreyfus in his Foreword to Mental Illness and Psychology, 1987. Cf. J. Bernauer (1990). Michel Foucault's Force ofFlight: Towards an Ethics for Thought, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, 1990, pp.24-36. 27 'After [Sade], violence, life and death, desire and sexuality will extend below the level of representation, an immense expanse of shade which we are now attempting to recover ... in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought'. OT, p.211. 28 J. Rajchman (1985). Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press, p.17. 29 Foucault/Blanchot, 1987, p.15. 30 'Preface to Transgression', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 1977, p.43. 31 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith; London: Tavistock Publications, 1972; original Paris, 1969. The Introduction raises several criticisms of the earlier archaeological writings. See also p.47where Foucault explicitly criticises the theme of an 'experience of madness' underpinning
Madness and Civilization. 32 M. Foucault (1977). Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan; New York: Pantheon Books; original, Paris, 1975. [Hereafter cited as DP.] 33 DP, p.308. 34 Ibid. 35 E. Canetti (1989). The Secret Heart of the Clock, Notes, Aphorisms, Fragments 1973-1985, New York; Farrar, Straus, Groux, p.104. 36 DP, p.23. 37 Ibid. 38 DP, p.305. 39 TFR, p.43. 40 UP, p.29. 41 Using a term of Foucault's from The Order of Things, p.xxii. 42 This term is used by Foucault to describe 'the procedure by which one obtains the constitution of a subject', PPC, p.253. 43 I am paraphrasing a passage from a 1984 interview of Foucault by Fran~ois Ewald, 'TheConcemforTruth',inPPC, p.257. Cf. UP, pp.14-25; andnotethatthe entirety of Part One takes 'The Moral Problematization of Pleasures' as its heading. Foucault's remarks in a 1983 interview also point to the importance this notion was corning to bear in his last phase of research. 'Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations', in TFR, pp.388-90. 44 Foucault, 'The Ethic of the Core of the Self as a Practice of Freedom', (1984), in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds) (1988). The Final Foucault, Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, p.10. [Hereafter this book is cited as TFF.] 45 Foucault (1978). The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley;New York: Pantheon Books;original, La Volontedesavoir,Paris, 1976. See especially the passages on the role of confession in the procedures of earlymodem individuation, The History of Sexuality I, pp.58-65. Note also the links between Foucault's concern here and in the incomplete and unpublished The
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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56
57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81
Confessions of the Flesh in which the pre-modem Christian constitution of subjectivity as a particular relation to 'the flesh' is Foucault's topic. On the unpublished volume seeM. Foucault,'About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics oftheSelf: Two Lectures of Dartmouth College',inPolitical Theory,2l (1993),and J. Bernauer, Michel Foucault's Force of Flight, 1990, pp.158-165. UP,p.28. Ibid, p.89; cf. BSH, p.236. UP, subtitle of Part One. 'What Is Enlightenment?', TFR, p.42. Ibid, p.41. Ibid, p.39. M. Foucault (1986). The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley; London, Penguin, p.43. [Hereafter, this book is referred to as COS.] PPC, p.49. Ibid,p.244. (The next two quotes draw on this same page.) See BSH, p.231. See for example, M. Daraki (1986). 'Michel Foucault's Journey to Greece', Telos 67; P. Hadot, 'Reflections on the notion of "the cultivation of the self"', in Michel Foucault Philosopher, trans. T.J. Armstrong; London: Harvester, 1992, pp.225-233. UP,p.l3. TFR, p.46. cos, p.43. UP,p.9. J. Rajchman, 1985, pp.17-18. Foucault/Blanchot, 1987, p.l2. Ibid, p.l3. PPC, p.24. PPC, p.312. Ibid. PPC, p.263. J. Rajchman, 1985, p.37. UP,p.8. TFR, p.39. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid, p.41. Ibid, p.42. Ibid, p.50. TFF, p.20. TFR, p.50. PPC, p.14. TFR, p.50. Baudelaire (1972). Baudelaire: Selected Writings in Art and Artists, trans. P. Charvet; Cambridge: CUP, p.419. M. Brod (ed.) (1972). The Diaries of Franz Kajkil1910-1923, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p.14. It is of interest that Foucault's own journal entries during 1984 include many excerpted passages from Kafka writings. See J. Miller (1993). The Passion of Michel Foucault, London: Harper Collins, n. 68, p.458.
82 TFF,p.4.
Foucault, Dialogue and the Other Chris !Falzon With the 'death of man', scepticism concerning the transcendental subject and the project of articulating ultimate, universal grounds to underpin and unify thought and action, the notion of difference or otherness - sexual, cultural and so on- has come increasingly to the fore. But how exactly are we to understand this development? Does the 'death of man' mean the fragmentation of thought and action into so many incommensurable worldviews, forms of life or cultural practices? Supposing this to be the case invokes at least two familiar kinds of response. On the one hand, such fragmentation may seem a positive development. For too long, different voices have been subordinated to a standpoint that claims to be universal and absolute, but is in fact historically specific, being white, Western and so on. By freeing ourselves from the illusion of an absolute standpoint, we open up the possibility of a new age of tolerance for diversity, for different forms of life. On the other hand, this may seem to leave us with a kind of intellectual and moral chaos in which 'anything goes', a radical relativism in which we are deprived of any basis for evaluating or giving coherence to our cultural practices. Such considerations may motivate one to seek to restore some notion of transcendental ground or foundation. Rather than entering into this debate, it seems tome thatitwould be more useful to ask whether the 'death of man' necessarily implies the fragmentation of thought and action in the first place. I want to suggest that what the death of man engenders is not fragmentation but a conception of ourselves as existing inescapably in the midst of dialogue, dialogue with the Other. Such dialogue does not preclude forms of social unity or organisation, but rather allows them to be understood as emerging out of the play of dialogue. At the same time, it also provides the basis for their questioning and transformation, through ongoing dialogue. I also want to suggest that one of the things Michel Foucault provides for us in his work is just such a vision of dialogue. I will come to this dialogical reading of Foucault in a moment, but let me first expand on the claim that the 'death of man' does not lead to fragmentation. Habermas provides a useful point of entry into this discussion, because he is a key figure amongst those who want to say that without some kind of transcendental foundation for thought and action, we are left with a destructive fragmentation. Certainly, as Thomas McCarthy points out, Habermas has seen that 'Philosophy [has] had to surrender its claim to grasp the totality of being from an extramundane position and on the basis of principles discovered in the very structure of reason'.l For the purposes of this discussion, let us call this the metaphysical view. It is still present in the metaphysical subjectivism of Descartes and Kant. But the Cartesian and Kantian picture has been transformed in the course of the nineteenth century into a view of the subject as inherently social and historical. And in
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this century, post-Wittgensteinian thinking and poststructuralism have reaffirmed the point. However, as McCarthy notes, this transformation has 'left in its wake a variety of forms of relativism, images of irreducible pluralities of incommensurable language games, forms of life, conceptual frameworks, life-worlds, cultures etc'. 2 If there are positions which accept and even celebrate this fragmentation, Habermas's project can be seen as a strategy to avoid it. His response has been to argue that fragmentation is not inevitable, that without simply returning to the ahistorical transcendental subject, we can still preserve something of the universal claims of transcendental philosophy through an analysis of communicative intersubjectivity. This is not an easy feat to bring off, as the well-documented tensions between the historicist and Kantian sides of his thinking show. 3 But do we need to follow Habermas in his problematic path? Does a decisive rejection of the transcendental subject, of a metaphysically grounded conception of unity, necessarily lead to fragmentation? I want to suggest that it does not, that it seems to do so only to the extent that we have not sufficiently let go of metaphysics. My point is that there remains in Habermas, along with the vision of fragmentation he wants to question, a continuing reliance on a metaphysical conception of unity. The idea they share is that if we do not have a unifying metaphysical basis, in the sense of universal standards or ultimate principles, we will be left with a plurality of incommensurable standpoints or formsoflife.Andthisistosupposethattheonlypossiblekindofunityisthat which is grounded metaphysically. In other words, the vision of fragmentation reflects a nostalgia for lost metaphysical unity. 4 Moreover, it seems to embody its own version of metaphysical unity. We are presented with the vision of a multiplicity of forms of life. Each is self-contained, totally governed by its organising principles, and so unable to communicate with other forms of life. And what this suggests is that in the vision of fragmentation, a single, all-embracing metaphysical unity has been replaced by a multiplicity of local unities, each governed by its own deep rules. It is a kind of metaphysical monadism, though without Leibniz's prearranged harmony. In short, I want to suggest, the vision of fragmentation continues to depend on a metaphysical notion of unity, unity based on all-embracing, fundamental principles. Which means that to decisively reject this metaphysics, we need to abandon not only the idea that there is a unifying metaphysical ground for thought and action, but also the idea that the alternative is a breakdown of thought and action into incommensurable fragments. Now, such a decisive break from metaphysics requires that we abandon its ruling principle: ie. the idea that we can capture the totality of being in a single, global account, that there is an ultimate standpoint or set of categories in terms of which all thought and action can be comprehended and organised. Here, to understand something is simply to assimilate it, to absorbitintoone'sframeworkofthought, toreduceittoamereinstantiation of one's categories. The familiar criticism of such totalising thought is that in its hunger to bring everything under its sway, it suppresses difference and otherness. Derrida, discussing Levinas' critique of egocentric thinking in
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'Violence and Metaphysics', speaks of Western reason as characteristically neutralising the Other, transforming the Other to the Same. In this, he adds, thought makes common cause with oppression. 5 I will come to the political aspect later. For now, I want to consider another aspect of this criticism. The other side of the claim that there is a standpoint or set of categories in terms of which all thought and action can be comprehended and organised is that we are unable to speak of anything that goes beyond these categories. We can only reduce everything we encounter to a function of these categories. As such, totalising thought falls into a kind of solipsism. Because it can only comprehend the world in terms of its own categories, it can only ever comprehend itself. It seems to grasp the totality, and to be autonomous, only because it is moving in a circle. Encountering itself at every turn, thought is thus condemned to a sterile repetition or affirmation of its basic categories, categories which themselves remain unquestionable within this system of thinking. In short, by seeking to bring everything under the sway of its controlling categories, totalising thought falls into self-enclosure. And in so doing, its account of the world becomes untenable. Because its standpoint, its ruling categories, are supposed to provide the ultimate basis for explanation and understanding, these categories themselves cannot be explained. It is impossible to account for how they came to be. To speak of them as 'a priori' is only to conceal the embarrassment of being unable to say how one acquired them. To suppose that our starting point somehow brings itself into existence is to invite the mockery Nietzsche directed at the idea of the subject as First Cause, the desire as he puts it 'to bear the whole and sole responsibility for one's actions and to absolve God, world, ancestors, chance, society from responsibility for them', insofar as it implies that it could be possible 'with more than Munchhausen temerity, to pull oneself out of the swamp of nothingness by one's own hair'. 6 In the absence of such an unlikely provenance, the totalising metaphysical position, unable to account for its ruling categories, shows itself to be untenable as it stands. It is more useful to see it as a pathology of thought, in which thought has come to be trapped and imprisoned by its organising categories. If we are to escape from this kind of entrapment, we have to accept in principle that there is no fundamental standpoint which can capture the world in its entirety. The world is not in the first instance a function of our categories, reflecting our starting point back to us. Rather, what is fundamental, primary, is our encounter with the Other, our encounter with that which does not simply yield to us, but which we encounter as different. Such difference is not relative, as for example in the Hegelian notion of an Other which is merely the self alienated from itself. It is an absolute difference, a truly Other, in the sense of something which is new, unexpected, which comes from 'outside'. It is that which resists or eludes our efforts to impose ourselves upon it, and which can in turn influence us, affect and transform us. So the suggestion is that a decisive rejection of metaphysical foundationalism does not mean the dissolution of thought and action into incommensurable fragments. Rather, it opens up the possibility of concep-
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tualising our situation in terms of a fundamental encounter with the Other. And I also want to suggest that it is in the course of such encounters that our forms of thought and life emerge, and are also transformed. To flesh out this further claim, let us consider what might be involved in encountering the Other. To encounter the Other does not mean that we are simply passive, at the mercy of the Other. This self-negating way of thinking is just as problematic as the attempt to reduce the Other to our standpoint. Now, insofar as we apprehend the Other, it is through a sheer revelation of the Other to us. And once again, thought comes to a halt. We are reduced to reiterating our initial revelation, which is itself taken to be absolute and unquestionable. But this too is an untenable position. We cannot account for how the Other comes to be an object of knowledge for us. In fact, knowing something is impossible without some activity on our part, some process of ordering or imposing categories on it. So we are not simply passive in our encounters with the Other. In encountering the Other, we actively seek to comprehend it, to assimilate and transform it in accordance with our categories. But, and this is the crucial point, the Other we encounter is not passive either. It is not simply whatever we interpret it to be. As Other, it also resists, affects us in turn, requires us to conform to its demands. As such, our encounter with the Other involves in the first instance a reciprocal movement, a to-and-fro interchange, an interplay.Inotherwords,whatisfundamentalisdialoguebetweenourselves and the Other, the term dialogue being used to stress the reciprocal character of the encounter. The primacy of dialogue so understood means that instead of all-powerful transcendental subjects, we are first of all finite beings, involved in the world, and able to be affected and transformed by external influences. At the same time, as active beings, we are able to transform these external influences in turn. Even in the process of our acculturation, we are shaped as active beings. This is why acculturation is not causal determination, but a process of training and also why those who undergo it do not simply perpetuate or reproduce the existing cultural forms. We continue to be active beings insofar as we transgress imposed limits, redeploying forms of thought and action we have acquired in new, innovative ways, and transforming those who imposed them on us in the first place, changing the culture into which we were born. We are thus involved right from the start in a social dialogue. Of course, it is always possible for one to try to impose oneself completely on the Other, ie., to try to silence the Other and to bring this dialogue to an end. But it remains the case that such silencing is a derivative, secondary state, which presupposes the dialogue it has arrested. To take this state as fundamental, to take oneself to be the solitary, sovereign master of the world, is to forget the dialogue relations out of which one has emerged; and there remains the permanent possibility of being confronted by the resurgent voices of others, the reopening of dialogue. Now the kind of picture being presented here, I want to suggest, can be found in the work of Foucault. Foucault, of course, is amongst those who question the pretensions of totalising thought. And it is possible to see his
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own position as embodying in a central way a notion of dialogue. Here it is necessary to reject readings which see his notion of force-relations in terms of a mechanistic physics, and which see him as presenting a dehumanised picture of impersonal forces engaged in mechanical interactions. Foucault does not deny the human being in this way. Rather, he provides a concrete conceptualisation of human agency in terms of forces, where, to borrow Paul Patton's formulation, force can be understood minimally as a power or capacity, inhering in an individual or body of some kind, to do certain things or make some kind of difference in the world. 7 More specifically, forces seek to order, to give form to, to interpret other forces. Here, interpretation is not just a matter of knowledge, of discursively categorising forces, but of concretely ordering, directing or harnessing those forces, a process in which forms of discursive categorisation also play a part. At the same time, because forces are always imposed on other forces, this imposition requires an overcoming of those forces, and there is always resistance to it, struggle against it, and the ever present possibility of reversal. In Foucault's notion of resistance, what I have referred to as the Other makes itself felt, as that which does not just conform to the categories one imposes on it, but also eludes them and is able to affect one in turn. We are presented, then, with a dialogical picture, in the concrete sense of an open-ended, reciprocal interplay or combat of corporeal forces. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Foucault speaks of force relations as mobile, shifting and unstable. In 'The Subject and Power', he speaks of the interplay between forces as an agonism, a relationship of reciprocal incitation and struggle. 8 The notion of agonism stresses the strategic aspect of these encounters, their character as combat, offensive and counter-offensive, in which moves are not predetermined but continuously being made. History in general is made up of these encounters, this open-ended dialogue of forces. For Foucault, dialogue, so understood, is fundamental. It is out of this dialogue that normative principles and stable forms of life emerge. With this, Foucault rejects the idea that there is some ultimate metaphysical ground, some central organising transcendental subject or class, that imparts order and unity to social practices. Our practices have unity, but it is not a metaphysically prescribed, grounded or necessitated unity. We do not need transcendental rules to explain the unity, order or coherence in our practices. It is from the practices themselves, the interplay of forces, from 'below', as Foucault puts it, that specific forms of social arrangement and unity emerge. Relatively stable systems of social order emerge to the extent that some forces or sets of forces come to be able to orient, direct and utilise others in a relatively constant way. Thus Foucault does not abandon the notion of unity, but understands it non-metaphysically, as arising derivatively and contingently out of the dialogue of forces. 9 The advantage of such unitary organisations is that when forces are able to direct and utilise the capabilities of others, this significantly extends what it is possible to do. For example, as Foucault notes in Discipline and Punish, new techniques of disciplinary regulation and the harnessing of labour power made possible an enormous increase in productivity at the beginning
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of the modern period.1° At the same time however, this multiplication of capacities can only be achieved to the extent that those forces which are directed and utilised fall into conformity, their otherness is suppressed and dialogue is limited. And to the extent that this happens, an organisation of forces is in danger of becoming ossified, limited by its own organising principles, closed to innovation. However, to the extent that these other forces continue to manifest their otherness by resisting, transgressing imposed limits, going in new and innovative directions, and exercising influence in turn, interplay or dialogue between the forces in the organisation can continue The organisation thereby becomes susceptible to instability and transformation. But it is only through such dialogue that organisations of forces can be reorganised and revitalised. In this context it is possible to locate domination. Organisations of forces may be more or less open to otherness and innovation, to dialogue and hence to transformation. States of domination emerge when otherness is entirely overcome, when dialogue is wholly arrested and transformation precluded. 11 A closed institution like the prison comes close to this ideal of domination. But the price of such domination is the complete suppression of innovation, utter stagnation in thought and action. And it is here that the totalising metaphysical thinking I spoke of earlier ultimately finds its place, as bound up with states of domination. Totalising thinking, such as humanist metaphysics, is concretely embodied in forms of social regulation which seek to impose complete conformity, and in which the principles to which human beings are to conform are presented as universal, absolute, metaphysically necessary. At the same time, the sterile self-enclosure of totalising thought is concretely manifested in the closed institutions of domination which preclude all innovation. However, although history is littered with examples of oppression, it is not clear that total domination, absolute power over the Other, could ever be achieved. All forms of social unity remain essentially derivative, emerging as they do out of dialogue. And while all organisations constrain dialogue to some degree, it is not clear that even the most oppressive organisation could completely suppress it. To do so would amount to bringing history to an end. But that degree of sovereignty would only be possible for an inhuman transcendental subject. Finite human beings always remain in the end subject to history, to the ongoing play of dialogue. And so, no matter how oppressive an institution, otherness will inevitably reassert itself through various forms of resistance, dialogue will continue, and forms of life will be subjected to re-examination. History, which continually generates forms of order, also embodies the permanent possibility of their transformation. On this reading, then, Foucault replaces humanist metaphysics not with a vision of fragmentation but of historical dialogue. The sovereign, allpowerful humanist subject is replaced with a conception of human beings as essentially finite, as existing inescapably in the midst of history, in the midst of a dialogue with others. At this point, however, it might be argued that this account really does no more than define dialogue in a special sense, as equivalent to Foucault's agonism, the struggle and interplay of forces. If
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so, then why employ the term' dialogue', which it might be thought implies some notion of reciprocity, if not equality? One reason, which I mentioned earlier, is precisely to stress that a reciprocal movement is involved. To abandon in principle the idea that there is a fundamental standpoint which can capture the world in its entirety is not to reduce us to mere servants of an all-powerful Other. It is to put us in a situation where we are both affected and transformed by the Other and able to affect and transform the Other in turn. There is a combat, a struggle, but it is a mutual, reciprocal struggle. It might then be argued that this picture of combat or struggle is still remote from dialogue. To participate in dialogue is surely to be willing to listen to the Other, to be open to the Other, and equally to reject the dogmatic absolutisation of one's own standpoint which blinds one to the possibility of other points of view. Perhaps one response to this is to suggest that such attitudesareatleastconsistentwithdialogueasihavecharacterisedit.Inthe dialogue of forces, forces strive to transgress imposed limits and to transform other forces. However, if the Other is entirely overcome and silenced, if states of closure and domination are established, the organisation of forces becomes imprisoned in its own organising principles, closed to innovation. Here, continuing transgression and transformation depend on the resurgenceoftheOther.Butitseemstomethatitisalsopossibletoadoptattitudes towards the Other which, although ostensibly opposed to transformative activity, work against the states of totalising closure which such activity can produce, and in this way promote continuing transgression and transformation. And by this I mean precisely an attitude of openness, a willingness to listen to the Other and to take its claims seriously, which is at the same time a refusal to view one's own standpoint as absolute and all-embracing. Arguably, too, such attitudes can be found in Foucault's work. His openness to the Other lies in his concern, in the face of totalising forms of social organisation, to open up a space for others, for those who resist, to speak and have transformative effects. It is a concern that extends to a refusal on his own part to speak for others, to subordinate resistance to a new kind of totalisation. 12 Rather than laying down the law for others, he adopts a critical, anti-dogmatic attitude towards himself and his present, an attitude which suspends assumptions that current forms of social organisation are metaphysically prescribed, universal and necessary. 13 To do so is to make visible not just the Other but the long series of encounters with the Other, the interplay of offensives and counter-offensives, in short the historical dialogue of forces, that has given rise to present forms of social organisation. And to reveal these forms as historically emergent and specific is also to open them up to the possibility of transformation through continuing resistance and revolt, through ongoing dialogue. The dialogue that such critique invites and promotes is, to borrow Nietzsche's phrase, a 'dangerous perhaps', a risky endeavour. It challenges existing forms of social stability insofar as the Other, the unpredictably new and innovative, has a disruptive and destabilising effect on existing forms of life. But the effects of this destabilisation are also positive. Stability in life comes at the cost of the suppression of the Other, of innovation, and hence engenders closure, stagnation and sterility in thought and action. The other
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side of destabilisation is that new forms of thought and action can emerge, and culture can remain vital. And it is the possibility of such life-giving dialogue that the 'death of man', properly speaking, opens up. 1
T. McCarthy (1982). 'Rationality and Relativism', in J. Thompson and D. Held (eds), Habermas: Critical Debates, Macmillan, p.59.
2
Ibid.
3
On this tension in Habermas's thought, see for example D. Hoy (1979). 'Taking History Seriously: Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas', Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34:93-4; and R. Roderick (1986). Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory, Macmillan, pp.164-6.
4
For a similar assessment of the 'anything goes' position, see E. Steuerman, 'Habermas vs Lyotard: Modernity vs Postmodernity?', in A. Benjamin (ed.) (1992). Judging Lyotard, Routledge, p.l12.
5
J. Derrida (1976). 'Violence and Metaphysics'. Writing and Difference, Chicago University Press, pp.91-2, 96.
6
F. Nietzsche (1973). Beyond Good and Evil, Penguin, p.32.
7
P. Patton (1989). 'Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom'. Political Studies, 37:286. See also my 'Foucault's Human Being', Thesis 11, 34,1993.
8
SeeM. Foucault (1978). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Penguin, pp.924; and 'The Subject and Power', in H. Dreyfus and R. Rabinow (1983). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, p.225.
9
See History of Sexuality, p.94.
10 M. Foucault (1977). Discipline and Punish, Penguin, pp.218-21. 11 On domination, seeM. Foucault, 'The Ethic of Care fortheSelf',inJ. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds) (1987). The Final Foucault, MIT Press, pp.3, 12. See also 'The Subject and Power', p.225. 12 On the role of the intellectual seeM. Foucault, 'The Concern for Truth', inS. Lotringer (ed.) (1989). Foucault Live, Semiotext(e), p.305. 13 See M. Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?', in P. Rabinow (ed.) (1984). The Foucault Reader, Pantheon Books, especially 39, pp.45-6.
Atrocity Mechanics: Is there a Logic to Modem Inhumanity?
Paul.9lf6erts To discuss issues of violence, of cruelty, of human destructiveness in general, it is necessary to begin with a tone of self-reflexivity. The academic curiosity about human violence- the dimensions of self-incurred misery, cast as the search for 'the explanation' (or some would say the expiation) has become a modern preoccupation of enormous proportions. Philosophically, this signifies a type of recognition in modern thought - of human secular death as a fundamental limit - ontological, epistemological, and ethical, which bounds the possible values (and devaluation) of human life. It is in a time which has, as Nietzsche put it, usurped the position and functions of divinities with its own self-images, its own self-importance, that we find ourselves pondering the root causes behind human violence and the capacity for self-destructiveness. Let us recall the positive features around which this limiting condition, human secular death, assumes its importance: the academic discourses of the humanities are historically shaped around the contradictory figuration of 'humanity', occupying, as Kant argued, and Foucault reminded us, the dual positions of the subject and object, the transcendental and the empirical, the finite and the infinite. The epistemic space opened up in the tension of these dualisms is self-reflexive in its very constitution: how can we understand the conditions of an empirical life, what means are to be used; 'What are we, we who study ourselves?' is the credo of the humanities scholar. But the practice of that reflexion is never transparent: it is always mediated- by the historically sedimented assumptions, values, projects and figures of the field itself. Sometimes that mediation is refracted through a particular authority- such as this present collection- where the place of speaking, and the acts herein, are traced through with the writings of Michel Foucault. His spirit- or rather we talk less colourfully of 'a legacy' - an inheritance, the marks left behind by an individual, ironically celebrated here as an author and authority - opens up the life of our conversations, carries us here today in our relations together - our ethos of academic community temporarily consecrated by our analysis of the legacy: what have we been left, or more crucially, what has become the bequest of the Foucauldian oeuvre? It is clear that from the range of uses in evidence, Foucault's central contributions are in methodology and sceptical enquiry that are amenable to very different domains, and have therefore instigated a proliferation of texts. To mention this here is to recognise the tradition in the modern humanities of clustering our debates around inherited texts their finitude after the death of the author in its metaphoric and literal senses), is of course often the condition of an infinite dissemination and reinterpretation.
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In this case, an enquiry into human violence finds itself paying due homage; the reader of Foucault knows that the entwinement of pouvoir/ savoir is an economy invested in finite life, calculable populations, fertility and mortality rates, but then indebted to machineries of wholesale slaughter, weaponaries of mass destruction, cults of blood and blood-lines, purges and flagrant sneers in the face of 'common humanity'. At another levelinstitutional knowledges and practices produce the normal, the sane, the rational, marking off, but requiring nonetheless, the pathological, the mad, the dangerous and deviate as the internal limit, the demarcation guaranteeing 'normal life' through marshalling those deemed marginal- securing them to prevent the potential threat to normality - and inoculating them with whatever techniques or discursive explanations make them safe to the population; ensuring the life of the social order, through the judicious pruning, of those morbid elements. A tradition of thought including Nietzsche, Weber, the Frankfurt School and Foucault examines how these administrative grids, the fine products of Enlightenment culture, were in themselves forms of violence, measured acts of revenge by the social body- even if in the West we see more sedation, counselling, and amelioration than taking of flesh and naked retribution. The analysts of the darker side of modernity point to not only the historically shifting and sometimes arbitrary lines of those divisions and judgments as a violence, but also the ease with which modern societies can accelerate the devaluation of human life: fascisms, lynch mobs, apartheids and on it goes. Now, the liberal criticisms of these thinkers inevitably suggest that social diversity and a capacity for tolerance are the pre-eminent ethical gains of a culture of universalisation, and we ignore those features at our peril. But of course, it is minds rather than bodies that, in modernity, are asked to 'understand' differences. The category of modern tolerance is ultimately psychological: to tolerate, is to perceive differences and submit them to the empty, formal viewpoint of the universal, and discipline one's specific, pathological biases. The ethics of modern humanisms and their institutional grounds asks individual psyches to bear the responsibility for their pathology- to tolerate and suspend the constituted desire to repulse others; absorb those gay, criminal, ethnic or mad threats to our ethos, through the comforting mediations of institutions and knowledge, but suspend your specificity, and acknowledge the other, so that then your difference might be recognised. The subject of modernity must carry both an individual specificity, and a steady injunction, an everyday whispered imperative to forsake it for the logic of the universal, carried in forms of abstract law and the levelling power of commodification in global capitalism. The burden on individuals, the cost of tolerance, can be said to be borne then through technologies of the self: part of the goal of self-poiesis is to present (or struggle to present) a socially acceptable persona of prejudice and tolerance. The violence of our orders of differentiation, masked by the drive to universalise are borne by subjects, in their work to shape practices of living, being with others, goals and hopes. Thus we can say that the subtleties of post-Enlightenment administration, built on the logic of the universal and the particular, enact their violence, not just in the more
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obvious ploys of intervening in, and managing the differences in civil society, but also through the internal violence of ego formation, the layering of defences, the captivation of oneself by appropriateness, the struggle to bear values that will reveal a self suitable to the truth-telling demanded of one's position/vocation. The later Foucault's concern with parrhesia, can in some respects be seen to augment, and reciprocally be augmented, by some aspects of psychoanalysis. The vocabulary of bodies and pleasures, though at odds with the discourse of psyche and desire, intersects at questions of the politics of selfhood. We only have to think briefly of the current tensions and torsions wrought in the name of 'political correctness' to see an example of 'ethics as a politics'- working on one's self, submitting or not submitting to semantic revaluations, redefining speaking positions and one's comportment in relation to others is both a desire for a certain moral suffering and a discipline with the promise of appropriate pleasure. Following this, Foucault's later work on technologies of the self can also be seen as intimate dimensions of pouvoir I savoir that fit in with earlier formulations rather than as a radical turn or contradiction. And while for some, the emergence of more ethical problems- the question of freedom, of the self, of ethos and so on- was taken as an admission of the collapse of the earlier Foucault's anti-subjectivism, for the purposes of this project, I see an extension rather, of the analysis of the powers and manner of truth-telling. An inquiry into the specificity of human violence in modernity thus should proceed on the grounds of recognising the particularities of modern subjectivity and its embodiments, its being for itself and others as manifest in institutions demanding a violence, an articulation of the self against itself, prevailing indebtedness, we might say along with Nietzsche, our guilt (Schulden) as self-incurred debt for the truth and worthiness of a modern moral life, an economics of pleasure and self-denial foreshadowed by the horizon of secular death. While this seems a rather gloomy portrayal of an inner violence of subjectivity, it is really just a claim concerning the inevitable inner divisions/inner conflict of subjectivity, and 'abrasiveness' of selfpoiesis: shaping oneself is clearly an agonistic activity. To evade this darker side of modernity, and merely celebrate a liberal tolerance, is often to celebrate our progress by seeing just behind us, in the recent past, an age with the embryo of a golden future, and the present we might have had- the 'nearly here' which is not quite present, but still lights our way. We can look back with hope for the future. Moments of technical and social achievement that appear as seductive lights are perhaps nothing more than the refracted images of the idealised birth of modernity in Enlightenment culture. As Voltaire remarked, 'The child is the father of the man'. This here and now is not ideal we are told, but it is better than before, or 'elsewhere'- as the West realises the promise of the Aufkliirung- from the philosophical birth of the modern present in Kant's self-reflexive maxim that we release ourselves from blind obedience and dogmatisms and have the courage to use our freedoms, our self-gained wisdoms. The path to human maturity is one concerned with'thepresent', with'the event', but is clearly also a shifting temporal domain- near future, near past; an implicit calculation of the contingency of the present- what might have
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been, what perhaps will be. I would argue that part of the shock of those events deemed atrocities- where humanity and human values are radically disavowed- is the experience or the question of their contingency. When we see human life radically degraded, the supports of our modern narratives slip; we receive a shock of recognition that the ongoing drama of an ethos has radical incalculability deep in its heart. Thinkers such as Habermas, falling in, some would say with liberal sentiments, and hoping to light our way with a formal and universalist procedure- the logic of communicative action guiding us with its inherent telos oriented to mutual understanding- ultimately produce a desire to return to a golden embryonic past- the open public sphere of rational debate amongst discursively competent subjects; that which consensus and democracy might have been/ still might be. Habermas, and others not wishing to give up on the project of modernity, enjoy the axiological conceit of supposing that free and open rational discourse might lead us to happy and consensual value formation. Were the conditions underlying modern subjectivity such that the labours of these discussions could be free of divisions, internal and external, free of indebtedness of many kinds - then one could happily endorse them, but communication is also miscommunication, calculated misunderstanding and self-misunderstanding to a radical extent. We need to continue those interrogations into the so-called dark side of the Enlightenment traditions, and ask, with the sceptical spirit of Foucault and the Frankfurt School, against the background of the administration of life and our traditions of truth-telling- what brings in to being atrocities in the modern age? What is the capacity for inhumanity- how do subjects engage, with a will (a will to what end?) in the brutalisation of others? As Foucault, in the crucial, but sometimes poorly glossed, sections of The History of Sexuality asks, how is it that in their own name, whole populations are wagered in wars of extinction, or anted up in diplomatic games and political gambles, or, at the other end of the human scale, how do we construct, produce, or benignly claim to 'discover' those spectacular individual instances of infamy and perversity such as the sadist, the serial killer, the unrepentant child-abuser, rapist, or homophobe? Is there, in the midst, and crucially now, at the edges of our increasingly well-fenced fields of prosperity and tolerance, a brute mechanics - a machinery of violence and a legitimation of certain knowledges, certain aesthetics of representation, certain permissible affirmations? I would say there is. We must immediately recognise, however, the enormous diversity of the logics of modern violence, and admit that in one research project, it is impossible to employ a sufficiently large theoretical toolbox to cover all the analytical tasks. This study narrows its work somewhat by employing the term 'atrocity', and seeking, not final origins, nor human nature, nor a law of genetics to ground the parameters of modern violence, but rather, in the light of Foucault's methodologies, the 'eventfulness' of atrocities; the conditions of emergence of events that come to stand as paradigmatic instances or types of phenomena both fitting and shocking to a particular culture. This path leads to a number of problematics- that I can briefly introduce, but which clearly need further elaboration.
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In the first place, we can recognise the atrocity as a form of limit event, summed up, for me, in a particular reading of Adorno's maxim: Nature is the scar of social mutilation. The atrocity is apprehension of the inhuman; that which a culture sees as the death or limit of its ethos, its manner of living. To apprehend the inhuman is to apprehend where living gives in to perceived asocial impulse, where the order established and enforced admits of a brutality- which can only be comprehended as so radically other, outside the law, or logos, that it can only count as physis, as the visitation of something under the name of the natural. Hence, we can describe the murderer as acting as a mere animal, or treating his /her victim as a thing, an object; or the invading army commits atrocities which suspend or devolve civilisation. The natural then marks out a possible understanding a way to comprehend, seal over, socially created savagery. Certainly the motivations for many atrocities can be sheeted home to economic and/ or political motivations, to torture and kill one's enemies so as to clear a path for domination, or wealth is an ageless tactic- one not specific to modernity. But it is only recently that we deduce 'crimes against humanity', out of earlier and long-standing traditions of formulating 'the rules of war', the Rights of Man, and the grounds of social contract. This century has witnessed continuing debates and conventions on the permissible and impermissible acts of murder and torture in the name of 'legitimate war': the tete atete of bayoneting is perfectly admissible- it has in fact a rich and illustrious history going back to feudal sword fights- while the sophisticated technological capacity to release a nerve gas or virus against an enemy from afar is considered barbaric to the point of being sub-human, bestial, absolutely evil. And in between the two extremes a whole ethical and legislative world has opened up to consider the worth and validity of new technologies of violence. In an era of possible total destruction, it is interesting to remember that conventional warfare has remained supremely important as commodity- the commodity whose use value lies increasingly in the debilitation and mutilation of personnel: land-mines, napalm, cluster grenades, soft-jacketed bullets that splinter in flesh, darts that enter the body without trace only to twist and rupture internally etc.- a spiralling technology that sees efficiency in the prolongation of agony, the multiplication of injuries that maim, not kill- because the resources to save the injured deplete the enemy, reduce his resolve, allow him to measure the cost of combat in living atrocities. We should not forget that a crucial part of the logic of modern atrocities is delivered through commodification. But now the figure of 'the non-human' enters the debate at precisely the highest point of social mutilation; where capacity to effect pain and death efficiently suddenly runs up against the limit of universalising morality: 'Can we really be creatures that obliterate so calmly, so instrumentally?' At this internal limit of humanist ethos, we discover Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or Josef Stalin- the bestial figure incarnate- the emblematic leader characterised as capable of acting utterly on the side of the inhuman: hence, in the preliminaries to the Gulf War, the sense of outrage felt when Hussein was pictured patting a young British boy. Such a figure cannot be a caring father. These figures do not simply force themselves like feudal lords on the
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modern world; they are 'found', created, and required as the embodiment or 'the skin' which individuates what is deemed as the propensity for natural human violence amidst the culture of administering life. The atrocity as limit phenomena is in fact then essential to the logic of modern law: its principle of supposedly standing all and sundry equal before the law (as rational principle) reveals its arbitrary, levelling nature, but also that law requires a 'dead centre', a limit or a thing from outside erupting on the inside as the condition of the functioning of the field. AB Kant argues, and Slavoj Zizek reminds us, law is law; obedience cannot be compelled by the force of reasons given; law must be obeyed because it is and nothing else; the obedience to the law which must be categorically given. For it to work, the rationality of justice, its use of reasons and conditions requires the unconditioned. The veneer of social order therefore requires eruptions, requires the atrocity in a mechanical way - to break the surface of law, precisely to assert, through the injury to Gemeinschaft, the values of Gesellschaft. The finite place of the living subject in the order of civil society, and yet its value as end in itself, can be affirmed by the punctuating horror of a murder, a suicide - a breach, in short, of the logic of life administration. 'We' have been injured- one of an 'us' has suffered senselessly at the hands of an-other, and we occasionally see this Other in the spectacular features of the despot, the public enemy, or dangerous individual as Foucault described. Hence, the machinery of justice is required to reassert the orderliness of public life; the recognition of our contingency demands the reaffirmation of ethos, there will be theatres of judgement, which must be attended. In a second theme, then, the atrocity stands out amongst the moral events set in place by a culture, because it violates in spectacular fashion the values established to countenance suitable behaviour. Atrocities are of the spectacle, are of cultural vision ruptured and torn by the breaking of bodies and their bearing of values. Consider the atrocity of a girl abducted, raped, murdered, tied-up and thrown into a river like a disposable object (you will be aware of one such recent case); the crowd outside the courtroom celebrates the revenge of the social body on the perpetrator by testing the limits of civilised constraint; by a show of brutal anger; by making explicit the desire to wreak vengeance on the villain; by, in fact, a mimicry of barbarity and asocial impulse as the symbol and attempted guarantee of the social order. In this paradoxical quasi-celebration of the barbarity of the murderer - in the thirst for revenge, waving placards calling for death, carefully plaiting simulated nooses, etc.- the crowd discovers the limits of sociality, of its particular, socially specific humanity. By challenging the normal machinery of the judicial process, the mob call forth the police: 'police us' is the plea: or as Adorno and Horkheimer investigated in the arena of fascist rituals- that which the crowd enacts is the desire for a disciplined catharsis. How often do the police end up arresting violent demonstrators, who, breaking ranks with the crowd (in order to show the crowd), hurl themselves uselessly at the passing police van, the gates of the court, or some impassive officer? This street theatre, of course, makes for some of the best news reporting; where the media can touch the nerve of moral outrage to just
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the right displaced degree. At times of great social stress this theatre is multiplied: the gesture can be modified, codified, harnessed by an ideology and/ or the figure of a leader, and the generalised construction of dangerous others paradoxically protected by the social order, by the judiciary. The object cause can become the Jew, the Serb, those communists. This is not, however, to run together in the formula of a mass psychology the construction of otherness, its mimesis, and social captation. The value of Foucault's later technologies of the self, can apply here in demanding we recognise that the techne of the self of a fascist is not the same as a vengeful demonstrator calling for the death penalty to be returned. Atrocities work to stimulate or pacify- call forth different aspects, different practices, through the shock of broken moral vision. Such drama works, becauseitissonear. Theatrocitycompels us to feel the possible terror lying always so close, a few heartbeats away: mangled bodies in a car crash; a teenage gangster with a knife; a psychopath with a gun. The modern conditions of anonymity in public space, and a powerful privatised sphere create certain liberal benefits, but also the tensions at the limits of the two; private violence, chaos and madness can possibly manifest itself in the freeway sniper, a massacre at McDonald's and arbitrary assassinationsrandom atrocities that send forth the figure of the free individual who may, 'be anyone' and be capable of indiscriminate slaughter. Anonymity is amplified and extended by random death: the fear of random death is simply the fear of anonymity levelled at oneself to the highest degree. The fear is one of respect made impotent: aimless violence is anomie, certainly, but it is also the generalised instability of the self in the face of the Other who refuses to be an-other in which we can recognise ourselves. Random serial killing is unexplainable finally as any kind of social rationale- and that is its greatest terror- and its greatest attraction. Mainstream cinema has for some time now celebrated the transgression of murder, particularly the seductive figure of the serial killer. But this phenomenon can take on more insidious dimensions, when in some countries, under a variety of pressures, a strata of the social order finds itself purely expendable, without social welfare, without possibilities for inclusion in social production. In Colombia, these people are called disposables, and they are simply seen as the by-products, the unnecessary excess, a kind of human excrescence that can be the target of atrocities, in a process of culling or reducing numbers in certain 'problem zones'. The victims of atrocities are confirmed as 'human meat', as temporary humans only; their murder, often random, and then the mutilation and/ or use of their remains are events can set in place the figure of the social parasite. The logic of the disposable, of the human excess is but the shortest of steps to a social parasitology: the atrocities of death squads, civil militia and police murdering and dumping bodies become events of cleansing, of lopping the parasites. The atrocity can become a necessary function, almost to the point of ceasing to be of that status, as a hardening social division abandons some to aless-than-humanstatus.WhiletheseeventsaredisturbinginSouthAmerica, the increasing class divisions, inner city collapses, and gun epidemic in the United States raise the possibility of similar events in the West. The limit
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conditions for such events do not have to be at the margins of the Western world, but can shift internally. The last theme in considering the atrocity, questions of representation and aesthetic production is perhaps the largest, most discussed but there is only space here for a brief mention of some elements. Clearly there is a proliferation, even an obsession with atrocities committed by 'dangerous individuals'; the serial killer is represented as an artist of sorts- the artist of humanflesh-ormorepreciselytheartistofthelimitsofethos,the(negative) artist (paradoxically) of human dignity by the affirmation of ourselves as mere things waiting to be drained of life; we interest ourselves in the style, modus operandi, fetishisms, mannerisms of the killer. How do they kill? Why? The victims become the expression of his or her individuality: the killer as artist is also by necessity the figure enlarged- the quasi-heroic figure now capable of grounding a narrative. American Psycho, for example, lays bare the reduction of people to commodities in the killer's fetish for upmarket lifestyle and savagery as entertainment. Both literary and film production show an increased enthusiasm for gore and explicit violence, there continues to be small moral panics matching each new phase of 'explicitness'. Perhaps more important is the growing intersection of the mass media with so-called real-life reporting, amateur videos, the commodification of the violent criminal, their 'true accounts' etc. The Bulger case in Liverpool, for example, shocked as much through the open documentation of events as through the particular horror of the 'evil child'. The horrors of Rwanda or Bosnia are represented here and now. Atrocities rupture the axiological landscape; serve as crucial landmarks, boundaries, borders; they are 'needed', but as the indicators of the field itself, its human and inhuman parameters; they are an event, of an effect of a culture which administers life with tenacity; they occur with a regular irregularity. We are tempted, of course, to point at human nature and leave it at that; but this paper argues their immanence to the social logic of modernity; they are particular functions of an era which universalises and invests in a common humanity, only to include, by necessity, within that logic, unconditioned chasms of violence and instances of the total disregard for the established values of human life.
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__ _,The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock, 1970.
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__ _,Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni. Press, 1977.
__ _,Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980.
__ _, Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979.
___, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (vol. 1), trans. Robert Hurley Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. __ _, 'Politics and Ethics: An Interview', trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. __ _, 'What is Enlightenment?' Trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, __ _,'Polemics, Politics, Problematizations: An Interview', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. __ _, 'The Subject and Power', afterword in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Sussex, Harvester Press, 1982.
__ _,The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon, 1985. __ _, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Habermas, Jiirgen, The Theory of Communicative Action: vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, vol. 2 Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon, 1984.
__ _, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987.
__ _,Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews, ed. Peter Dews, London: Verso, 1986. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan, 1983. Martin, Luther H. et al, Technologies ofthe Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, London: Tavistock, 1988. Nietzsche,Friedrich, On the Genealogy ofMorals, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Vintage Books, 1969.
__ _,Twilight ofthe Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
__ _,The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Zizek, Slavoj, Tarrying with the Negative, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
__ _,The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989.
The Disorder of Things: Foucault and Comic Writing 'Tony Scmmto In 'The Black Sun of Michel Foucault', an essay in Heterologies, Michel de
Certeau writes, apropos of The Order of Things, that: Over time, and in the density of its own time, each episteme is made up of the heterogeneous: what it does not know about itself (its own grounding); what it can no longer know about other epistemes (after the disappearance of the fundamentals they imply); what will be lost forever of its own objects of knowledge (which are constituted by a structure of perception). Things are defined by a network of words, and they give way when it does.Order emerges from disorder only in the form of the equivocal. Reason, rediscovered in its underlying coherence, is always being lost -because it is forever inseparable from an illusion. In Foucault's books, reason dies and is simultaneously reborn (1986:173).
I would like to firstly address, and then take up and extend this particular set of points offered by de Certeau about Foucault's work, a set of points which suggests that, for Foucault, the production of regimes of truth and knowledge are not only open to contestation; rather the production of truth, as de Certeau reads Foucault, is predicated on a certain inescapable failure and ignorance. I will address de Certeau's arguments as to why this is the case, and then move on to make two additional points, both presaged, but never explicitly articulated, by de Certeau. The first extension of this point is that if the conditions and means and practices through which discourse and narratives, knowledge and regimes of truth, establish and authorise themselves, are at the same time the conditions and moments of their disestablishment, of their self revelation as loss and ignorance, then we can say that the production of truth and knowledge needs to be understood, generically, as having strong affiliations with the comic. The second extension is that this particular consanguinity between productions of truth and knowledge and the comic, and the ramifications of that consanguinity, can be seen to be understood, taken up, and specifically utilised by Foucault as a means of avoiding what Lacan might call the imperative to close the circle of signification. The final section of this paper will be devoted to a brief and largely impressionistic analysis of precisely this kind of Foucauldian practice, specifically the Damiens section of Discipline and Punish. In his various essays on Foucault's work in The Practice of Everyday Life Practice (1988) and Heterologies (1986), de Certeau continually refers to, and insists upon, the centrality to that work of dichotomies such as ideology I procedures, words/things and signifier/signified. For de Certeau the grounds of truth are prepared through claiming both to overcome those dichotomies (that is to say, to claim to have closed the circle of signification), and to be able to have exhaustively located and identified and evaluated
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those procedures, things and signifieds; in other words, claiming to have knowledge of 'everything that is the case'. Now to a large extent, these two processes (of valuation and identification) are the same process. A thing can be identified only when it has meaning; that is to say, when it can be classified and ordered. Every regime of truth is predicated on this relationship between valuation and identification. Someone is only identifiable as human, for instance, because (at a certain time, in a certain place, for certain people) they provide markers and produce performances that have been assimilated into, and institutionalised as, cultural categories (involving say, notions of gender, race, class, age, literacy). In fact we can follow Judith Butler on this point and say, paradoxically, that materiality itself only comes into being through the agency of cultural categories of perception that are themselves dependent on, and recognisable through iteration (1993). Paradoxically, regimes of truth always call up that which they produce as evidence of their own authority and legitimacy. As Slavoj Zizek (1991) has argued, the law always makes use of the effects of the law and the power of the law to legitimate the law. Men and women, adults and children, come before the law as the (legally) evaluated categories of men and women, adults and children, categories produced by the law, which then claims to treat, disinterestedly, what it finds before it. Incongruously, truth and knowledge can only mechanically deny their own validity, can only proclaim, violating our expectations, the lie of truth and the ignorance of knowledge. Paradox, incongruity, mechanical repetition and violation of expectation are, of course, strongly associated with the comic: Freud (1981), Bergson (1921), Bakhtin (1968) and Rene Girard (1978) have built their various theories of the comic on these shifting and unstable grounds. As does Foucault in his work; he writes in The Order of Things:: This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all those familiar landmarks of my thought -our thought, the thoughts that bear the stamp of our age and our geography -breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things ... This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, G) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) etcetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by the means of a fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking 'that' (1973:xv).
There is no need to labor the consanguinity between violence and the comic, nor any need to point out that sudden encounters with the exotic Other can be read in a number of negative ways (for instance, to confirm the Other as inhuman). Nevertheless the comic has a great deal to offer, as Foucault's work demonstrates. The comic move is always reciprocated, as Rene Girard (1978) has pointed out. In the moment I laugh, I dissolve both
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that which I laugh at and myself as laughter. Foucault's laugh dissolves truth and knowledge, but at that moment he becomes like the cartoon character who notices that he left solid ground some time ago, and has been walking on air, at which time he tumbles into the void. In the opening to Discipline and Punish (1987), we are presented with a problem to solve, a puzzle. What do we make of these accounts of the torture and execution of Damiens that Foucault has brought together? Why these details? Where do these accounts, these discourses, fit into the scheme of things? What do they mean? As Damiens is called up by and processed through the discourses of journalism, bureaucracy, religion and technology, we notice that these discourses are anything but certain in the treatment of their subject. What do his actions, his responses, his performances, mean? Can he be taken apart, carefully, rigorously, almost scientifically and then metaphorically put back together again? Most importantly, can his body be disciplined by the law? These questions are never answered satisfactorily, for as Foucault's deployment of these accounts, and his contextualising of these discourses and narratives indicate, the law is an ass that cannot even work out how many horses it takes to tear a body apart; technology finds slaughter a messy and unsatisfactory business, even when pincers are specially designed for the occasion; and confessors invariably turn up after the confessing soul ... has become a lost soul. And yet every activity and discourse and narrative in this account of Damiens works to try and make things explain and fit and mean. Executioners and torturers and technicians cut off Damiens' thighs and sever his sinews and hack at his joints, while the spectators, we are told, are edified by the solicitude oftheParishPriestofStPaul's, who 'despite his great age', does 'not spare himself in offering consolation to the patient' (Foucault 1987:3). What we have here is farce, with absurdities and blunders- and blunderers - in profusion. But whose comic accounts are these? Is the attempt to produce truth comic in itself? What is the status of Foucault's intervention? Who is the author of this farce? De Certeau is right to emphasise the ways in which discourses and ideologies babble; right to point to the comic dimension of signifiers aimlessly sliding across discursive spaces in search of signifieds. At the same time, it is the practice of deployment, the throwing together of the Same that is not, the teasing out of differends which, for instance, brings to light in the Damiens section the absurdity and impossibility of any affinity, even any easy coexistence, between the man of God and the technician; and, paradoxically, at the same, the absolute necessity of that alliance between truths that hardly recognise one another. What we have here then, in the Damiens section, is underkill (nobody can make this body behave and comply) and overkill (why does it take so many truthsandsomuchknowledgetoachievesolittle?).Foucaultdoesnotcreate this incongruity; but he does read it, and pass on that reading position, what we might term that literacy. As Foucault suggests, this kind of spectacle had to go because it gave too many opportunities for too many to observe how the law does not work. Which explains, to a certain extent, the move from punishment to discipline, from spectacle to science. But what we are dealing
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with here, in this epistemic move, is a change from one (comic) genre to another; a move that Foucault plots, not as an evolution, but as a new sleight of hand. In this regime of reason, everything that is the case is shown to be different from itself, to be ignorant of itself, to exceed itself; and in these comical, incongruous or paradoxical half-openings of discourse the 'possibility of thinking otherwise bursts in' (1973:xv).
Bibliography Bakhtin, M. (1968). Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky, Cambridge: MIT Press. Bergson, H. (1921). Laughter, trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell, London: Macmillan. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter, London: Routledge. Certeau, M. de (1986). Heterologies, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. __ _, (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault ,M. (1973). The Order of Things, New York: Vintage. __ _, (1987). Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: Vintage. Freud, S. (1981). Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. J. Strachey, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Girard, R, (1978). To Double Business Bound, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zizek, S. (1991). The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.
Beyond Power/Knowledge, or Towards Erasing the Distinction Between the Discursive and Non-discursive (jeorge Petelin The 'Conservatism' of Foucault To me it does not seem a good method to take a particular science to work on just because it's interesting or important or because its history might appear to have some exemplary value .... But if one is interested in doing historical work that has political meaning, utility and effectiveness, then this is possible only if one has some kind of involvement with the struggles taking place in the area in question (Foucault 1980:64).
Despite the political commitment expressed in this statement by Foucault in Power/Knowledge, despite his avowed materialist aim to' question teleologies and totalisations' through a method 'purged of all anthropologism' (1972: 16), and despite his vehement dissociation of his method from structuralism with its implication that discourse can be reduced to language and hence ideas, Foucault's method and his conclusions remain vulnerable to charges of being conservative. How can such intentions have allowed him to trivialise the role of Economy, demoralise revolutionary aspirations, assassinate dialectical progress, and purvey yet another totalitarianmetanarrative as he is variously charged?
Trivialiser of Political Economy While there is now a fairly general consensus that the Economy is not as monolithic as classical Marxism conceived it, the sheer dogmatism with which it is given no role at all by some Foucauldians is terrifying to many critics. What Marx achieved, in foregrounding an articulation of global economy with particular economies, is taken by them to have been totally reversed through Foucault's dispersing of the economic domain. Consequently, even Marxists such as Poulantzas, who subscribe to the notion of diverse micro-relations of power, cannot forgive Foucault for not accounting for the development of the modern state in terms of capitalist relations of production (Jessop:1985). Whether you explain the state in terms of an economic system or not, local social relations and changes within them are undoubtedly affected by specific economic dependencies on general centralised procedures and policies. No wonder critics such as Sheldon Wolin are prompted to respond that: 'Locality is the ground that has to be defended against state-centred politics .... Theory locates the self and the local grouping in relation to the more encompassing structures of power which are the hallmark of state-centred politics' (1988:199). Foucauldian theory, on the other hand, laments Wolin, has no place for action, only for practice. Action is not identical with practice. Practice signifies doing things competently according to the appropriate
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received canons. Action is often role-breaking or custom-defying, for frequently it seeks to defend the collectivity against evils that are sanctioned by rules and traditions. Action can only play this role if it is free to respond to experience and is guided by theory only to a limited extent. By this formulation discourse is denied the pretensions illicitly gained by its incest with practice' (Wolin 1988:200).
What Wolin envisages is clearly something more substantial than the everyday practices of transgression described by De Certeau (1985), he hankers for at least the possibility of revolution.
Restorer of Metanarratives But Foucauldian theory also attracts more balanced criticism. Peter Dews' critique of post-structuralism, The Logics of Disintegration claims that Foucault's notion of power, equates with 'productivity and efficiency of those purposeful-rational forms of organization which Weber detected in modern, bureaucracies and in the capitalist organization of the labour process' (1987:151). 'The result of [Foucault's] ... simplification', says Dews, is that power,' .. having nothing determinate to which it could be opposed, loses all explanatory content and becomes a ubiquitous metaphysical principle' (1987:166). For instance, Dews reports that when asked on the relation, other than instrumental, between knowledge and power, 'Foucault's most straightforward answer ... presents power as a precondition of knowledge rather than knowledge as a precondition of power' (1987:173). Chiding Foucault together with Lyotard, Dews points out: 'If Lyotard places an exclusive emphasis on the 'revolutionizing effects of the norm-free sociality' of the market in his account of capitalist modernity, then Foucault's work espouses an equally one-sided view, in its unrelenting stress on the rationalized system of administration and social control'. Ironically, a vestige of Marxist fundamentalism leads Habermas to class Foucault, along with Derrida as a 'neo-conservative'. According to Habermas, they each claim 'a decentered, subjectivity emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness' (Habermas 1983). In this view, it is the total instrumental rationalism of Foucault's method that is its downfall. Thus Foucault is charged with making power the derniurge at the foundation of everything- precisely the sort of essentialism his supporters would wish to avoid; for it is essentialism that breeds the totalisation that a Foucauldian method prides in dismantling. Thus, Foucault is accused also of constructing his own totalising metatheory to take its place above the other Grand Narratives. Even a sympathetic reader such as David Couzens Hoy, for example, finds The Archaeology of Knowledge to 'look much like an attemptataself-justificationwhichwouldput[Foucault's]ownphilosophy, in Kantian fashion, on the secure path of science .... Archaeology starts looking like Kantian transcendental philosophy when it posits an a priori that can be deduced or at least indirectly inferred only by this one particular method' (Hoy 1988:31-2). Although Hoy weakly concedes that ' .. .like Nietzsche Foucault does not believe that genealogy is a privileged way to think the unthought [the 'archive' ofrules], but merely one way of doing so' (Hoy 1988:32) this only begs the question for the problem remains framed in the distinctive terms of Foucault's own meta-epistemology. Feminist critic
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Isaac D. Balbus notes that to hold 'disciplinary technologies responsible for the very constitution of the modern-individual-as-object-and-subject is necessarily to attribute to them a totalising power that only totalizing theory can name' (1988:152). At the same time, Balbus is resentful of the fact that Foucault's 'critique of totalizing reason condemns as totalitarian the very awareness of the pervasiveness of male domination which women have so painfully achieved' (Balbus 1988:150).
Assassin of Dialectic It is Foucault's' ... adoption of a monism of one dimension of force which
escapes the logic of the signifier' argues Dews which 'dissolves the link between power and oppression and desire and liberation, and therefore the political content of the concepts themselves' (Dews 1987:167). This monism puts him at odds with both Marxist and Hegelian critique. Thus Baudrillard is moved to advise us to 'Forget Foucault'. He begins by asserting that Foucault is a late Messiah whose analysis may once have been relevant but now is obsolete. Arguing from the point of view of his theoretical hobbyhorse- the simulacrum- Baudrillard surmises that Foucault can only speak of power because power is already dead; for there are no longer systems of power /knowledge to be analysed but only endless simulations thereof. And further accuses Foucault of fixing history into a 'classic semiurgy of power and sex' (1987:15). Referring to Foucault's conception of power as a filiation en abyme (1987:9) 'without origins' and without 'catastrophe' he obliquely charges Foucault with aestheticising politics by producing an account, as he says, 'too beautiful to be true' (1987:11). It may be edifying to digress for a moment here to compare this aesthetic account of Foucauldianism with a Foucauldian account of aestheticism- Ian Hunter's description of Romanticism as a technology of the self: 'its practitioners take the fact that this process has no end- in either sense of the word - as a sign of its ethical superiority. To have an end would reduce the aesthetic experience to the status of an instrument wielded for certain rationalpurposes,hencedeprivingitofitscompleteness'(Hunter1992:354). This goalless disinterestedness bears uncanny resemblance both to the ethos of Foucauldian analysis and to its conclusions. Baudrillard maintains, however, that power must start off on something like an exclusion, a division or a deniat and on that basis power can produce something real or even the real' (1987:17). For Foucault, Baudrillard claims, 'the crisis or peripeteia of power does not even exist. There is only modulation, capillarity, a "microphysical" segmentation of power, as Deleuze says'. What emerges as the core of this rather obscure, ellipticat and lyrical critique of Foucault, is a charge of evolutionism at the expense of revolution. For Foucault, argues Baudrillard, power operates right away like a genetic code, 'according to diagrams of dispersion and command (DNA), and according to a teleonomical order'. 'Teleonomy' according to Baudrillard, 'is the end of all final determinations and of all dialectic: it is the kind of generative inscription that one expects - an immanent, ineluctable, and always positive inscription that yields only infinitesimal mutations' (1987:34). The term teleonomy is borrowed from the field ofbiologywhere it means'an impression of purpose arising from adaptation through natural selection'.
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It was coined from the Greek Telos, meaning 'far off end' or 'perfect', and
nomia: 'management, law, distribution, or arrangement'. Here, it also connotes nominalism- the philosophical denial of abstract entities or universals which sees all categorisation as arbitrary. Foucault's notion of apparent unities forming out of dispersed interests is thus, not inappropriately for a genealogy, compared to Darwinian descent. Interestingly, Paul Bove draws more positive attention to how Foucault's inheritance of Darwinian genetic premises leads him to stress error rather than reason. Drawing on an introduction thatFoucaultwrote to Canguilhem's On the Normal and the Pathological, Bove concludes that: As a genealogist interested in disclosing the history and structure of power from the point of view of the present, Foucault learns his basic lessons from Nietzsche and Canguilhem: he learns what we should call 'the lesson of error'. Accident or chance, Canguilhem argues, lies at the biological basis of life, in the genetic materials themselves. Errors of genetic coding always occur. For Foucault and all genealogists, this implies that error and not reason is at the root of what makes human thought and its history. Interestingly, Bove also points out that Canguilhem's Darwinian notion of 'compensation' by which apparently stable norms or forms of life temporarily succeed in reconciling opposing demands ... translates politically into Gramsci's notion of hegemony, that is, the dominant, which gives its identity to the stable moment, achieves its position by virtue of the set of concessions it offers to the conflicting groups it directs and leads. In other words, compensation is a political process in the creation of an intellectual and disciplinary stability. It is not rational in the disinterested sense ... (1988:64-65).
However, there is one more account of this notion of teleonomy that I wantto conclude with: it issues out oflinguistics, so I must first make a point about the dualism within Foucault's notion of discourse. While discourse is now often reduced to the term 'practices'- which can practically include any and everything- it must be remembered that despite Foucault's denial that he was ever a structuralist, his archaeology also implies an ambiguous linguistic dimension with traces of Saussure's langue/parole distinction which sometimes differentiates between the discursive and non discursive, at other times not. A thorough critique of Foucault's 'Linguistic Fault' is made by Brown and Cousins (1986). They identify the chief source of confusion in Foucault's account of his method, as being the failure to adequately distinguish between the 'statement', and 'language'. Foucault, they claim, 'merely declares that a sentence and proposition exist at a different level of existence from the statement' and as a consequence of this, 'there exists a continuing thread of ambiguity' in the relation between language and statements in Foucault. An 'integrated' methodological model must recognise that though signs, as well as propositions, sentences, acts of formulation, and material things, can all participate in statements, they can all exist without being a statement and none of them is indispensable to a statement's formation. The single adjustment to Foucault's use of terminology which can allow a clear distinction between language and statement for our amended model is a differen-
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tiation between the methodology's references to part of a statement and its references to the whole of a statement. The directly visible part of a statement - manifested in what we may recognise as a sentence, a sign, an act or an object, or a group of these - can then be considered but a trace of the mechanism that differentiates it as a statement. A statement's differentiating attribute, then, is that it is not just a random appearance of one of many possible permutations of words or elements, even within conformity to a systematicity of language, or a singular thing independent of what is normally called a discursive context, but something which emerges complete with a precise appearance, and a position or status in relation to other statements, due to the multiple sites and procedures which contributed in making it possible. Therefore, a statement must be seen as distinct from a sentence or any entity considered in a purely semiotic way, or as a nondiscursive thing, through its possession of a host of non-linguistic 'correlations' within the discursive field. For this reason as Foucault at one point admits, 'the statement cannot be defined because it is not in itself a unit, but a function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities, and which reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and space' (Foucault 1972:87). In other words, the statement is not characterised by any aspect of its appearance but by the conditions that govern the specific emergence and existence of that appearance and endow it with dispersed social potencies and investments not identifiable with either an autonomous power of logic or with linguistic meaning. In the practical application of this model, therefore, a visible manifestation must be considered to belong to a statement if it can be shown to have correlations which regulate it and establish a status for it. Distinguishing between visible traces which coexist in a text, a site, a discipline- or in any of the other unities to which we are prone- and the rules and conditions of their existence which themselves exist in other dispersed practices, also avoids the tautological reasoning, identified by Brown and Cousins, (1986:50) by which Foucault gives statements the task of embodying rules for their own existence. In a revised formulation, it may thus be considered that a set of correlations, whose own practices and sites of operation need not coexist in time and space or within a category, form rules for the coexistence, sequencing, modality and emergence of only the traces that appear in the apparent unities of discourse. It would be quite absurd, in fact, to talk of the coexistence of whole statements when their greatest portion is, by definition, dispersed. Thus the space of visible manifestations provides an opportunity for the intersection of statements but not a coexistence. This distinction, between the statement as a whole and its more readily accessible part, has repercussions for any practical adaptation of Foucault's model of the discursive formation- particularly with regard to rules for the formation of concepts which in The Archaeology of Knowledge refer to whole statements and in a revised model must refer to only the visible figures that form a portion of statements- the' documents' and 'monuments' with which an analysis begins. This dispersal is necessary in order to avoid the idealism that results from Saussure's privileging of langue over parole in order to avoid teleology which inadvertently confers upon linguistic structure a
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causal determinacy. As well as implying a teleology based in linguistic structure, structuralism's denial of determinacy to parole would deprive the specific text of its political moment. However, this failing in Saussure was recognised even within linguistics itself - by his most ardent disciples. Jakobson writes: synchrony contains many dynamic elements and it is necessary to take this into account when using a synchronic approach .... Saussure's ideology ruled out any compatibility between the two aspects of time, simultaneity and succession. [Saussure] attempted to suppress the tie between the system of language and its modifications by considering the system as the exclusive domain of synchrony and assigning modifications to the sphere of diachrony alone. In actuality ... the concepts of a system and its change are not only compatible but indissolubly tied Gakobson and Pomorska 1983:57-58).
An account of language which avoids this idealism in an attempt to restore the power of political effect to language can be found in the work of Volosinov. Volosinov points out that considering language to be entirely dependent on linguistic systematicity - what Saussure terms langue - supposes that meaning is conveyed through 'normatively identical forms'. Yet, an objective standpoint must recognise that at any moment the forms of language are also undergoing transformation. This leads him to the conclusion that no such system actually exists at' any real instant of historical time' (1973:66). Language, thus, is in a continuous process of becoming, and any static slice of it is necessarily only a convenient fiction. When Volosinov reasserts the primacy of language performance over structure he makes some useful distinctions: between recognition and understanding, and between signals and signs. He grants that, to an individual consciousness, the recognition of a perceived normatively identical form constitutes a signal- an utterances/ he is making or receiving. But what constitutes communication - enables that signal to be a sign- is the 'new and concrete meaning it acquires in the particular context'. He goes on to argue that 'what is important for the speaker about a linguistic form is not that it is a stable and always selfequivalent signal but that it is an always changeable and adaptable sign' (1973:68). Thus the constituent factor for the linguistic form, as for the sign, is not at all its self-identity as signal but its specific variability; and the constituent factor for understanding the linguistic form is not recognition of 'the same thing' but understanding in the proper context of the word, ie. orientation in the particular, given context and in the particular, given situation- orientation in the dynamic process of becoming and not 'orientation' in some inert state (Volosinov 1973:69).
Jakobson's associates in the OPOJAZ group, Trubetzkoy, Tynjanov and others also did not see change as arbitrarily related to the system but neither did they wish to visualise it as a causal chain. The best summation of their position possibly comes from the poet Boris Pasternak who attributes linguistic change to 'a confluence of circumstances that makes the historical and psychological principles coincide in their function' (1983:67). It is in this spirit, as a member of the Prague circle, that Jakobson replaced teleology
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with teleonomy- changewhichis goal-directed without being diachronically caused (Holenstein 1974:118) This vision of an opportunistic confluence of unconnected systems bears some similarity to Althusser's notion of overdetermination but more to Foucault's discourse. A clarification of how diachronic changes of language may be observed 'simultaneously'- in a synchronic sense- is supplied by another member of the Prague circle, Jan Mukarovsky (1976:54,83). Adopting from Volosinov the notion of a 'semantic dynamics' he notes that our interpretation of language is always goal-oriented. We are oriented towards some unity of syntactic meaning the moment we conceive of some beginning semantic series as a sentence. Our interpretation, he maintains, is served by a' semantic accumulation'- every new unit is perceived against a background of the one before it and all the preceding ones so that 'the entire set of semantic units of which the sentence is composed is simultaneously present in the listener's or reader's mind at the conclusion of the sentence' (1977:51). He stresses that the order in which this accumulation has occurred is significant to the meaning of the final sentence. Importantly, he also notes, that 'the sentence is not ... the last and the highest step in the hierarchy of semantic units' and that the sentence itself 'very often refers semantically to a broader context, especially that which has preceded it' (1977:53). As Volosinov writes: 'A book, ie., a verbal utterance in print, is also an element of verbal communication... ' (1973:95). Jakobson visualises the process of linguistic change as follows: the beginning and end of each change are always recognised as such during a period of coexistence in the community. The point of departure and the end point may, however, be distributed in different ways. The older form may be characteristic of an older generation and the new one to a younger, or both forms may belong from the outset to two different styles of language, different subcodes of a single common code, in which case all members of the community have the competence to perceive and chose between the two variants .... In as much as the start and the finish of a change simultaneously belong to the common code of a system of language, one must necessarily study not only the meaning of the static constituents of the system but also the meaning of the changes which are in statu nascendi. Here the Saussurian idea of changes that are blind and fortuitous from the point of view of the system loses ground. Any modification takes place first at the synchronic level and is thus a part of the system, while only the results of the modifications are imparted to the diachronic dimension (1983:58-9).
The speech community tends to include the temporal axis among the linguistic factors which are directly conceived. For example, obsolete elements of a linguistic system are felt as archaisms and new elements as the latest fashion (1983:60). Thus Mukarovsky's model- the 'Prague prism' as Holeinstein (1974:31) calls it - is adapted by Jakobson to describe the accumulation and struggle of alternative language uses. It should no less instruct an investigation of the rise and decay of practices in the discursive formation. In viewing the construction of a text as a struggle for meaning, Mukarovsky distinguishes between the simple act of selecting from a set of permissible paradigms, in the Saussurian manner, and designation, the creation of a sign
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against the background of an existing system (Mukarovsky 1976:73). This notion derives from the work of another member of the Prague circle named Karcevskij to whom, as Steiner and Steiner (1976) report, every use of a linguistic sign is a new fitting of signans to signatum, extending the range of reference of the signans, if ever so slightly. In this sense, Karcevskij claims, using a word transforms it into a homonym, the sound referring to a new reality. But at the same time, since the particular situation is generalised through the code into a type of situation, the sign applied to it becomes a synonym of all the words which have been or might be applied to such a situation (Steiner and Steiner 1976:73-76). What this means is that every utterance is in fact a linguistic change; every statement is in itself a political effect. As Volosinov contends, every 'utterance is above all an evaluative orientation. ... a change in meaning is, essentially, always a re-evaluation: the transposition of some particular word from one evaluative context to another' (Volosinov 1973:105). My concluding point is this: it is patent that the work of discursive transformation operates even as we examine it. The same principle can be seen as arch conservative in one context and as liberatingly dialectical in the next. While Foucault would claim the 'economy' of discourses - their intrinsic technology, the necessities of their operation, the tactics they employ, the effects of power which underlie them and which they transmit -and not a system of representations- is what determines the essential features of what they have to say (Foucault 1980:68-69), their relation to each other and to the apparent unities they produce, although not always strictly linguistic, must transform neither more, nor less, dialectically on the many local levels of their 'utterance' than does language.
Reference Balbus, I. D. (1988). 'Disciplining women: Michel Foucault and the power of feminist discourse', inJ. Arac (ed.) Humanistic knowledge, postmodern challenges. London: Rutgers University Press, pp.139-160. Baudrillard J. (1987). Forget Foucault. New York: Semiotext(e). Bove, P. (1988). 'The rationality of disciplines: The abstract understanding of Stephen Toulmin', in J. Arac (ed.) After Foucault: Humanistic knowledge, postmodern challenges. London: Rutgers University Press. Brown, B. and Cousins, M. (1986). 'The linguistic fault: The case of Foucault's archaeology', inM. Gane (ed. ), Towards a Critique ofFoucault. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. de Certeau, M. (1985). The practice of everyday life, trans. S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dews, P. (1987). Logics ofdisintegration: Poststructuralist thought and the claims ofcritical theory. London: Verso. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. __ _, (1980). The history of sexuality: An introduction, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Random House, Vintage. Habermas,J.(1983).'Modernity-anincompleteproject',inH.Foster(ed.),Postmodern culture, London: Pluto Press. Holenstein, E. (1976). Roman Jakobson's approach to language phenomena. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Hoy, D. C. (1988). 'Foucault: Modernorpostmodern?',inJ. Arac (ed.),After Foucault, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp.12-41. Hunter, I. (1992). 'Aesthetics and cultural studies', in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler, (eds ), Cultural Studies, New York and London: Routledge, pp .347-72. Jessop, B. (1985). Nicos Poulantzas: State, class and strategy, London: Macmillan. Mukarovsky, Jan (1976). On poetic language. J. Burbank and P. Steiner (eds.) Lisse: Peter de Lidder Press. Mukarovsky,Jan(1977). The word and verbalart.J. BurbankandP. Steiner (eds.),New Haven: Yale University Press. Steiner, P. and Steiner, W. (1976). 'The relational axes of potetic language' (postscript), in J. Mukarovsky, On poetic language. Lisse: Peter de Lidder Press. Volosinov V.N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language, trans. L. Matejka and I. Titunik,New York: Seminar Press. Wolin, S.S. (ed.) (1988). 'On the theory and practice of power', in After Foucault: Humanistic knowledge, postmodern challenges, in J. Arac (ed.). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp.179-201.
Foucault's Sublime: E-Mail to Postumius Terentianus 1
It is always difficult to trace beginnings - as such a tracing requires a figure
already there which mediates between beginning and end. Reflecting on the absence of both- by chance I found a translation of Longinus' letter -now known as On Elevation of Style or The Sublime. What attracted my attention was that it was a peculiarly Australian event: translated by T.G Tucker, Emeritus Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Melbourne, printed in Australia and published by Melbourne University Press in 1935. It was a message from the colonies to an Empire in decline and a message introduced by a profound index of its placement: 'In a gold-mining country one may perhaps be excused for putting it that the "Longinus claim" keeps on crushing nearly twenty hundredweight to the ton'. 2 It was the irony that claimed me and led to my astonishment- a communication from the mining colonies to the Empire claiming the high ground on the Elevation of Style, with a mining analogy. Not only this, but like the mine, the text is one of bits and pieces, spaces and odd remnants. Unfortunately the sublime has for the most part not managed to recover from the ravages of the Enlightenment when separated from other possible beginnings, it was set into opposition with itself. An opposition from which it has still not yet been able to completely take flight and that in eighteenth century Romanticism found expression in the misleading dichotomy of the sublime and the beautiful.3 It now seems clear that the Enlightenment had mistaken a misanthropic solitary asceticism for a dialectic of the sublime. In order to give weight to the beautiful, its antithesis the sublime, was distorted from an active force existing in itself- to being the ugly, shadowy counterpart of the beautiful. But if the history of the Enlightenment has been marked by this curious opposition we must ask whether it is possible to re-present the sublime as an active force? And if this is so, what metaphor most appropriately draws us towards it? To return to Longinus: For the effect of superlative passages is not merely to persuade the hearer, but to carry him off his feet. The cogent or the pleasing must always give way to the startling effect of the wonderful. Whereas it generally lies with ourselves to be persuaded or not, the fine passages in question carry with them such an irresistible force and mastery as to overpower any hearer. Moreover, skilful argument and a deft arrangement and handling of our materials, are not made apparent by one or two sentences, but must reveal themselves gradually from the whole texture of a speech, whereas a splendid utterance produced at the proper moment, comes like a thunderbolt, pulverises all mere facts, and displays the full power of the speaker in a single flash. 4
And so here we have delineated the constitutive features of the sublime -elevation, revelation, a proper moment, a thunderbolt- a single flash. All
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this carries one away - to new heights. Demosthenes is the archetypal transmitter of the sublime who is compared by Longinus to:' ... a lightning stroke or thunderbolt for the vehemence, rapidity, energy, and terrific effect with which he both fires and shatters? and again: ..... I say, because he absorbed all these potent gifts - which are apparently god-sent, for one dare not call them human - he surpasses any and every speaker by the virtues which he possesses, while dispensing with those which he does not possess, and so overcomes by his thunder and lightning all the orators of all time. It would be easier to confront a rushing thunderbolt with open eye than to face his rapid flashes of passion.6
This sublime is almost irresistible, but is a wholly active productive experience- enlightening- a blinding flash. And yet what is it about this sublime of Longinus that would allow us to distance it from that of the Enlightenment? As Longinus tells us: With the practical argument the orator has combined a vivid presentation, and has, by the joint effect, gone further than mere logical persuasion could go. In such cases we always instinctively obey the stronger call, and for that reason we are forcibly diverted from that which merely demonstrates to that which carries us off our feet with its vividness, whereby the literal argument is buried in a blaze of light. That experience is not surprising; for, when two forces are brought into line with each other, the more potent always absorbs the virtue of the other?
This is a sublime that by virtue of its brilliance absorbs the rational, the dialectical- in the single line of its own release of energy. One can only experience an ironic amusement in the knowledge that the Enlightenment -one of the most profoundly dark moments in our history invented itself on a strange opposition, a strange dialectic and in a moment of arrogant pride declared it had overcome the darkness of the Dark Ages. Since that time it has survived by maintaining the weakness of one side of this opposition- in a repulsive and cunning parasitism - that zombies the enemy it feeds on. Presumablythatis whyitrefuses to giveitthe coup de grace and is why at this exact moment the Enlightenment discovered the conjunction of history, anthropology and aesthetics.s The brilliance of the sublime is that it creates multiple transparencies, at worst translucencies. Darkness is inimical to the sublime. But allow me to re-examine the letter of Longinus which draws our attention to the constitutive features of the sublime. Longinus tells us that there are five 'fountainheads' of the sublime all resting on the command of language 'without which we can do nothing': 1. a capacious grasp of thoughts and ideas; [natural] 2. strong and vehement passion. [natural] 3. the construction of figures (which are of two kinds, one consisting in the turn of thought, the other in the turn of expression). 9 4. admirable diction (of which, again, the parts are the choice of words and the coining of imaginative turns); 5. serving as a frame compacting all the rest, a masterly structural arrangement.
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According to Longinus, the first two, a capacious grasp of thoughts and ideas and strong and vehement passion, are natural capacities, the last three are techniques that can be learned. Allow me to concentrate on the first two in the context of examining where we find the combination of a capacious grasp of thoughts and ideas and vehement passion. Following Longinus, I would argue that we find it where a conception covers a great distance from heaven to earth, a conception that amplifies the extraordinary, that astonishes, that startles: a conception as magnificent and unpredictable as thunderbolts and lightning themselves. This brings together elevation, height and motion under the sign of the sublime. Longinus goes on at some length to detail the parameters of these conceptions for his contemporaries but for us this is an impossible returnfor us, what remains is just the lightning flash, the thunderbolt and the possibility of abduring dialectics. 1o This allows us to provisionally redraw a figure of the Enlightenment and its carefully constructed double problematics- sublime/beauty, rational/irrational and so on without being for or against it. 11 In this way we can address the question of what it is today that restores to us a wholly active non-dialectical moment of the sublime a moment which Michel Foucault has discussed variously as attraction (Blanchot), desire (Sade), force (Nietzsche), transgression (Bataille), materiality of thought (Artaud), or collectively thought from the outside. 12 This becomes a counter-restoration, an analytic that elevates precisely at that moment when all that is recognisably human disappears, not into darkness, but because of the extreme brilliance and energy with which it is bathed, a brilliance so intense that it clears the ground around it - like lightning.13 To a certain extent the intensity of the sublime always involves the concept of relative distance: close I far, bright I dull, descent I ascent not in terms of oppositions but as magnifications, amplifications, modulations and so on because proximity is constitutive of the possibility of any specific determination. 14 Butproximityfromortowhat?Proximityfromtheproduction of oneself as a subject. But what is it to be a subject- to be subjected? 1S Itissurelytosubjectoneselftotheknowledgeofone'sownmaterialfinitude. And from where could this astonishing moment have come? From the clearing around the finitude of one's being- death. Has anyone ever existed who was not aware of the finite materiality of their own existence? Is this not the general problematic of existence? But nowadays, far too often, this amounts to reifying and refusing to transform an age old question - why must we die? Now there is a new question to be answered - a profoundly nominal question - what is the effect of problematic of finitude on our everyday existence? And further to this and much more terrifying, does a language yet exist that will allow us to engage with this problematic? This is Foucault's thought from the outside which transfigures the work of Artaud, Blanchot, Nietzsche, Sade and Bataille and draws out the impossible limit of our finitude. Will the event of death take place with greater speed than it can be formulated within language? Will we dissolve into the outside faster than we can articulate the experience of its arrival or disappearance? This 'unrepresentable' of language, this limit, then returns as a critique of the possibility of any complete, essential universal system of representation. 16
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This is what draws transgression beyond its own limits, to a language not yet heard but which already exists - a drawing that lies in wait for its figuration. Neither beautiful or ugly just sublime. But if this moment of capture is not essential, on what does it rest? Perhaps it rests on the provisional, on uncertain repetitions, coincidental flights? The same coincidence that put the madness into [Fou]cault's name. But is this not far too cerebral and do I not privilege my imagining over my own material existence - another idealism - another Platonism? Worse still am I not constructing another active passive relation, waiting to be struck by lightning, by the puissance of the gods? Another dialectic? Perhaps I can only give the proper respect to these questions by not attempting to answer them just now and instead reconfigure the already said. The moment of the experience of the sublime- of the disappearance of the unified self is bound by the materiality of the finitude of physical existence. A moment that is sublime precisely because it is configured within the experience of finitude. Lightning requires of the clearing that it surrounds the space of the flash. It is the clearing that elevates itself at the moment the lightning earths. It is our limited materiality that draws into being the 'immaterial'. It is our finite existence that allows us to elevate ourselves to the infiniteP But if lightning and distance are constitutive of the sublime we must not forget passion, the second of Longinus' natural elements. It is the possibility ofpassionthatallowsusanactivelivingengagementwiththesublime-with its eroticism, its brilliance, its danger bordered by the ever present revelations that accompany the thrilling terror of looking directly at a brilliant light, of looking directly into the sun. 18 A passion that disperses and multiplies is a passion that draws the sublime. A draught of the future that is an implicit critique of Plato's poisonous potion and always threatens its own violent Annunciation. Every possible dispersal conjures up this sublime possibility. In so far as we are aggregates of materials and forces- then to multiply the possibilities of the exchange is to encounter the limit - the outside. Cell to cell- synaptic flash with synaptic flash, fold with fold. This limit is also the encounter of the limit - in the clearing of the sublime. As Foucault has suggested: Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being; transgression forces the limit to the fact of its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes (perhaps, to be more exact, to recognise itself for the first time), to experience its positive truth in its downward fall. And yet, toward what is transgression unleashed in its movement of pure violence, if not that which imprisons it, toward the limit and those elements it contains? What bears the brunt of its aggression and to what void does it owe the unrestrained fullness of its being, if not that which it crosses in its violent act and which, as its destiny, it crosses out the line it effaces?19
A limit that is also the limit of the language of our own materiality: this is the foundational relation we have with ourselves - this is the inside of the curve or the fold. 20 This is both the separation and the unity of the inside and the outside. This relation is inscribed within Foucault's third aspect of the
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struggle of the subject; 'that which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others ... '. 21 This moment has revealed itself in our epoch and presents a diagram of an ethics of the self which flashes into light- particle and wave - sketching a transformed aesthetics. It is an aesthetics that is neither Greek -nor Romantic European- nor the uniform trajectory of one to the other but that turns on the thetic which is characterised as: laying down or setting forth; involving [only] positive statement. This necessarily leads to Foucault's limit attitude which involves 'a critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical ontology of ourselves'. 22 This limit attitude places thought at the frontier of its own limit - abandoning the search for the discovery of continuously repeated universal structures and instead focusing on how it is that we have come to recognise ourselves as the subjects which we recognise ourselves as. In attending to this task we must necessarily transgress the limits of our being in history. This in turns announces itself as another historical event that effects and requires another modulation of ourselves. This is as Foucault suggests: 'the undefined work of freedom'. 2 3 But why does this require an encounter with a diagram of the sublime? Perhaps it is because at this time in our possible existences we encounter the thought that at some time in the foreseeable future the thought of the sublime may no longer exist. The being of the sublime would be forever concealed. There was a time when it was conceivable that the gods would no longerinhabitourworld. There was a timewhenitwasconceivablethatGod had died. Now we live in an age of conceiving of the death of the entire species, even of all life forms on the planet. This presents the possibility to us that the sublime may no longer be thought- the outside might trace the inside - every fold might be pulled into a straight line, every straight line might just be discontinuous dots, death may no longer be the clearing but be all there is. The passionate embrace of the sublime may dissolve into an empty lifeless landscape: everything reduced to the inanimate. Lifeless objects- orbiting through the space of the real, encountering multiple lifeless substrata, a point of absolute irreducibility, of absolute presence. And yet what is so astonishing in this vision is not its cataclysmic millenarian pessimism- but its appalling anthropomorphism, its irresponsibly naive attempt to imply that the existence of anything meaningful is dependent on human reflection of the sublime? Does the sublime demand of itself that it be recognised? Or is it rather that today humanity demands of itself that it recognises its unique dependence on the problematic of the sublime. In other words, today, encounters with the sublime are profound encounters with ourselves. 24 This surely is the return of Foucault, whose work constantly forces us to encounter ourselves - in the production of knowledge about ourselves. An inescapable return, an inescapable encounter which does not have to be endured but can be worked upon as we work upon ourselves. An ethical, thetic dimension, a passionate dangerous dimension that embraces the sublime in the production of thunderbolts and lightning- and for that instant temporarily defers the slippage of outside and inside.
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This is the conjunction of a line of flight of Longinus and Foucault. Their work is itself sublime- as it storms, rails, thunders and now and again strikes the ground with a brilliant and enlightening flash. But today there are no gods to encounter, today the encounter is with ourselves in our finitude and in the knowledge that we are constructed as what we are as an effect of power /knowledge relations circulating within analysable practices and regimes. 25 It is here that we meet Foucault's insistence that we question this moment in our epoch with rigour and an irritating persistence that may create an opening for ourselves. As Foucault suggests referring to Raymond Roussel: It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor for who
one is: one writes to become someone other than who one is. Finally there is an attempt at modifying one's way of being through the act of writing. It is this transformation of his way of being that he observed, he believed in, he sought after, and for which he suffered horribly.26
Just as Foucault never met Roussel- I never met Foucault- I never shook his hand- nor kissed his cheek. But this is of no importance in 'using him' because in his work we do not encounter him- he is gone- but in the already said of Foucault we can encounter ourselves. We can encounter new surfaces, new folds, new lines, new meanings and in these encounters we have the opportunity of reaching out to the sublime as we also engage in a flight from ourselves- and from everything that we have become. Then our epitaph and Foucault's momentarily fuse in the line of reciprocal flightmost beautifully drawn out by Nietzsche: Flight from oneself - Those men given to intellectual spasms..... who are impatient and gloomily inclined towards themselves and in all they do resemble rampaging horses, and who derive from their own works, indeed, only a short lived fire and joy which almost bursts their veins and then a desolation and sourness made more wintry by the contrasts it presents- how should such men endure to remain within themselves! They long to dissolve into something 'outside'.. P
Now that's a sublime Foucauldian thought.
1
For a collection of important essays on the sublime see Jean Fran<;ois Courtine et al. Of the sublime: presence in question, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.
2
Longinus, Longinus On Elevation of Style, trans. T.G. Tucker, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1935, p.S.
3
See I. Kant, Observations on thefeelingon the beautiful and the sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991. Kant allows for there to be three kinds of sublime, the third the splendid sublime incorporates a certain beauty, however, the fundamental opposition is still the beautiful and the sublime, as is suggested by the title of the work. 'Finer feeling, which we now wish to consider, is chiefly of two kinds, the feeling of the sublime and that of the beautiful. The stirring of each is pleasant in different ways ... In order that the former impression could occur to us in due strength, we must have a feeling of the sublime, and, in order to enjoy the latter well, a feeling ofthe beautiful. Tall oaks and
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lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful. Temperaments that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity. The shining day stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime moves, the beautiful charms. The mien of a man who is undergoing the full feeling of the sublime is earnest, sometimes rigid and astonished. On the other hand the lively sensation of the beautiful proclaims itself through shining cheerfulness in the eyes through smiling features, and often through audible mirth. The sublime is in turn of different kinds. Its feeling is sometimes accompanied with a certain dread, or melancholy; in some cases merely with quiet wonder; and in still others with a beauty completely pervading a sublime plan. The first I shall call the terrifying sublime, the second the noble, and the third the splendid. Deep loneliness is sublime, but in a way that stirs terror' (p.46). See also E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, J.T. Boulton (ed. ), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. See the Preface to the First Edition p.1, 'He [Burke] observed that the ideas ofthe sublime and beautiful were frequently confounded; and that both were indiscriminately applied to things greatly differing, and sometimes of natures directly opposite. Even Longinus, in his incomparable discourse upon a part of this subject, has comprehended things extremely repugnant to each other, under one common name of the Sublime'. 4
Longinus 1935, p.12.
5
Ibid, p.28.
6
Ibid, p.52.
7
Ibid, p.34.
8
Foucault makes the point that a certain blackmail exists in discussions of the Enlightenment in so far as the possibility of a rational critique of rationality is denied. You are either a supporter of the rational or irrational.
9
Figures of 'thought' are: insistence, extenuation, hyperbole, irony, questionform, correction of oneself, aposiopesis. Those of expression are: repetition, antithesis, asyndeta, play on words etc. But a real distinction between the two classes is scarcely possible.
10 It is of note that later discussions of the sublime [including this one] ignore the conceptualising of 'sound' in the sublime and only seem to focus on the visual. See Librett 1993, Michel Deguy, The Discourse of Exaltation, pp.10-11. See also G. Deleuze, and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p.310. 11 M. Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?', in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p.45. 12 M. Foucault, and M. Blanchot, Foucault/Blanchot, New York: Zone Books, 1987, p.27. I am not saying that they are all exactly the same concept. 13 This is the moment of Heidegger's entry. SeeM. Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', in Basic Writings, Krell, David Farrell (ed.), London: Routledge, 1993, p.178. 14 Hence the importance of Zarathrustra's descent from the mountain. Above everything else Zarathrustra is a geography teacher!
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15 M. Foucault,'Afterword: The Subject and Power' in Hubert L. Dreyfus, and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982, p.208. 16 This is the basis of a nominalist critique of both metaphysics and realism. 17 These relations are not dialectical but are amplifications and magnifications. 18 The dangerous nature of the sublime is typified by the work ofSade. See Marquis de Sade, Justine: Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, New York: Grove Press Inc., 1965 pp.741-2, 'Terrified, Madame de Lorsange begs her sister to make all haste and close the shutters; anxious to calm her, Therese dashes to the windows which are already being broken; she would do battle with the wind, she gives a minute's flight, is driven back and at that instant a blazing thunder bolt reaches her where she stands in the middle of the room .... transfixes her. Madame de Lorsange emits a terrible cry and falls in a faint; Monsieur de Corville calls for help, attentions are given each woman, Madame de Lorsange is revived, but the unhappy Therese has been struck in such wise hope itself can no longer subsist for her; the lightning entered her right breast, found the heart, and after having consumed her chest and face, burst out through her belly. The miserable thing was hideous to look upon; Monsieur de Corville orders that she be borne away ... ...The prosperity of Crime is but an ordeal to which Providence would expose Virtue, it is like unto the lightning, whose traitorous brilliancies but for an instant embellish the atmosphere, in order to hurl into death's very deeps the luckless one they have dazzled'. 19 M. Foucault,'Preface to Transgression', in Bouchard (ed.) Language, CounterMemory, Practice, New York: Cornell University Press, 1980, p.34. 20 Or Moebius strip. 21 Foucault 1982, p.212 22 Foucault 1984, p.45. 23 Ibid, p.46. 24 This is a profound index of the modem. 25 This is the beginning of a neo-nominalist critical practice. 26 M. Foucault, 'Postscript: An Interview with Michel Foucault', in Death and the Labyrinth, The World ofRaymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas,New York: Doubleday and Co., 1986, p.182. 27 F. Nietzsche, Daybreak- Thoughts on the prejudices ofmorality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p.221.
Part Five Psychoanalysis
Foucault, Hegel, Psychoanalysis and Anthropologies of Truth
In this paper I want to recontextualise Foucault's thought according to a
number of influences which constitute what I call a metaphysics of alterity in his thinking, that is, a metaphysics based on self-other relations which is evidentinhiswork. ThisrecontextualisationwillinvolveexploringFoucault's work in relation to French Hegelianism and to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The place I want to begin in this recontextualisation is with the work of Alexandre Kojeve, a philosopher made popular in more recent times by the end of history polemic, (here I am thinking of Francis Fukuyama, New Times theorists and Jean Baudrillard). Like Julian Pefanis in his 1991 book Heterology and the Postmodern, I want to completely affirm the 'now conventional argument that Alexandre Kojeve' s reading of Hegel in the 1930s at the Sorbonne constituted a decisive moment for the development of a theoretical counter-tradition in France'.l Kojeve's reading of Hegel concentrates on the Phenomenology ofSpirit, and in particular on a moment within the Phenomenology in relation to which history is said to be overcome by an anthropological structure of alterity for which History as a teleological or evolutionary process, makes no sense. 2 This structure arises out of an equilibrium or decentering that results from the metaphorical encounter of two desiring subjects, what in Hegel is called Desire in general. Whereas with subject/ object relations, the desire for an object is, according to Kojeve, to consume it, or to break open its secret in a relation of totalisation, the relation between two subjects is characterised as an endlessly asymptotic or productive kind of Desire which transcends the capacity of any one subject to totalise or represent its relation with an other. Anthropogenic Desire is not the Desire of an object, but the Desire of a Desire. It is the reflection of a reflection- a double mirror relationship, which is endlessly renewable and productive, never coming to rest in self-consciousness. It is productive, says Kojeve, because of the inability of an individual desire to attain an exhaustive relation of desire with the other, to be certain of possession, to be transparent receiver of intention, to totalise the desire of the other in a one to one correspondence. Kojeve' s privileging of alterity, in its specular form, is not a movement toward the death of the subject, but a positive account of a structure of subjectivity in which historicity dissipates or implodes within self-other relations. This account of historicity is the opposite of historicism, which for Kojeve, subordinates human desire within the metaphorical model of subject-object relations. Kojeve insists that history and historicity are an outcome of unstable because always unachievable relations between a subject and an other, rather than a stable world of object relations (mappable in spherical and linear ways). For Kojeve, the question ofidentity and concomitant questions of origin, telos, causality, meaning and the referent are completely subordi-
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nated to this metaphysics of alterity. This is the subject world and timeworld of a double-mirror in which alterity is inextricably linked to a dialectic of metonymy, the simultaneous folding and multiplication of the subject in a specularity without beginning or end, where the representation of historical circumstance is without point. Representation is without point, not because the subject is mystified or in possession of false consciousness, but because in the very process of representation, history is continually produced and modified to a degree that the subject is unable to maintain a singularity or distance from it. And this is the status of the subject, whether or not we are talking about action or consciousness. This complete breakdown of historicity is not, for Kojeve, a fall from historicism, it is rather merely the revelation that anthropologically, history is merely a contingent mode of experience that is internal to alterity. Actual historical struggles and encounters are therefore merely contingent expressions of the eternal return of Desire in general, merely a phenomenal expression of the equilibrating fact that no subject can ever pose the axis in which its existence can be presented to it. As a metaphysician of history, Kojeve was an important precursor to contemporary philosophies of history such as Foucault's because of the way he stressed the extreme fragility of circumstances, the continuous and localisable seesaw of struggles which are only ever grounded in historically arbitrary structures of recognition, which in another moment, another scene, might switch to new ways or recognising and new ways of constituting truth in accordance with this recognition. At the same time, the localisable nature of power relations in Kojeve, are nevertheless mediated by way of two anthropological dialectics which he called 'dialectics of the real'. 3 Firstly there is a dialectic of the struggle for definition, what in Kojeve is a dialectic of a death-driven symbolic fight for recognition;whilstsecondlythereisadialecticofWorkorBildung,whichfor Kojeve is not production, but the transformation of the social contexts which structure recognition (the information society), what for Kojeve is embodied in modern technique. What is common to both these dialectics is the anthropological importance of recognition and alterity, which could be compared in Foucault with forms of power he once described as structuring the field of the eventual action of others, be it techno-architecturally (panoptic power), or by representation (forms of bio-power or pastoral power). 4 How these dialectics relate to the end of history that Kojeve is speaking about is that such practices achieve, not a heightening of evolution or spirit, but an auto-negation of the very historical contexts which give them meaning. For Kojeve they result in the construction of a last world in which the decentering of recognition relations is universalised (here one might think of Lyotard's petit recit). This is a world in which instrumental control is rendered meaningless in its traditional sense, as neither means nor ends are given, and representation as a function of the division between subject and object is no longer tenable. The end of history is, for Kojeve, at best revealed to be an irreversibly cybernetic, self-referential or circular reality, in which memory is overcome by the prevailing structures of recognition. Kojeve' s last world is one in which eternal verities become untenable, the question of truth problematic in the sense that history as the realisation or
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generalisation of Desire in general has made them redundant. Kojeve's dialectics of the real produce a state of paralysing imprisonment in a kind of permanent present, in which case the historical itself becomes meaningless. The present, therefore, is never simply self-present but an irreducibly political construct, which for Kojeve is mediated by the risk of Life and Work; that is, Desire in general. Kojeve's is a very pragmatic definition of politics and truth where, for him, the true is the outcome and the moral is on the side of the victor. It is my view that one could write an excellent philosophical investigation of the similarities between Kojeve' s idiosyncratic brand of Hegelianism and Foucault's analytic of power. Through the themes of alterity, of the dialecticallyproductivenatureofpower,andofthefunctionofresistance,Foucault, like Kojeve, adopts the view that the very powerfulness of power, relies on the fact that it can never be possessed, totalised, or captured. For example, in a formulation from one of his late interviews, he argues that to understand how power works is to understand 'the way the reflexivity of self upon self is established' at a given moment. (ie. power always entails a recognition structure). 5 In his essay 'The Subject and Power' Foucault says Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not super-imposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal... For a relationship of confrontation, from the moment it is not a struggle to the death, the fixing of a power relationship becomes a target- at one and the same time its fulfilment and its suspension.6
I could multiply these citations from Foucault here in many directions but I want to move on to a more biographical account of Foucault's debt to French interpretations of Hegelianism, which is to consider his relationship to the philosopher who is often described as being at the centre of a second Hegelian Renaissance in France- Jean Hyppolite. According to commentators such as James Bernauer and Vincent Descombes, Hyppolite's greatest contribution to intellectual trends in France between the wars, was his Hegelianisation of Nietzsche. In this, he, like Kojeve, magnified the anthropologies of power that arose out of the master slave dialectic. In Hyppolite's Studies on Hegel and Marx, many formulations are an exact reinstatement ofKojeve's central pre-occupation with desire-ingeneral, and alterity: self-consciousness is for Hyppolite 'generalised desire? Or again: 'the desire that constitutes the self can only exist if it is for itself an object of another desire. Thus the desire of life becomes the desire of another desire, or rather, in view of the necessary reciprocity of the phenomenon, human desire is always desire of the desire of another'. 8 In what has been seen by many as a rather puzzling adulation, Foucault, in his inaugural lecture at the College de France, credits Hyppolite, as the most powerful influence on his work, 9 exclaiming: 'I have borrowed both the meaning and the possibility of what I am doing from him' .10 What is more, it is here that Foucault hails as Hyppolite's most important achievement precisely the introduction of Hegel into the heart of intellectual circles.
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Foucault, who once described Hegel as the 'philosopher of the greatest differences' but who 'nevertheless recuperates all play to a system', 11 found occasion at his address to praise Hyppolite's conviction that Hegelian thought needed to be encountered and understood, in order to begin an interrogation in which an opposition to the Same could have any meaning. To truly escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Heget insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that it permits us to think against Heget of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us. 12 Could this motionless Heget be a figure who, in one of Foucault's last interviews is referred to as a silent influence: one of'a small number of authors with whom one thinks, with whom one works, but about whom one does not write'? 13 Since the early fifties when Foucault had been making himself acquainted with the texts of Marx, Hegel, Heidegger and Nietzsche, he wrote very little on the configurations of their influence on his thought, and even less on these figures as philosophers in their own right. 14 But certainly Hegelian thought, as introduced to Foucault by Hyppolite's Hegelianisation of Nietzsche, had exercised a foundational influence on Foucault's intellectual trajectories throughout the 1950s and 1960s.15 The Kojevian and Hyppolitean rereadings of Hegel's Phenomenology were ones which, as Vincent Descombes has remarked, 'might well attract a Nietzschean'. But it was never the case for Kojeve and especially Hyppolite that Hegel was simply a figure that might add support to Nietzschean theses on a post-historical superman, rather, for them, Hegel had already anticipated the critique of humanism in the form in which it is usually attributed to Nietzsche.16 On the other hand what could be interpreted, in Kojeve at least, as a Nietzschean reading of Heget is Kojeve' s terrorist conception of history and its related pragmatic definition of truth. Kojeve's account of the Phenonemology does contain much that is excessive, violent and sanguinary. As Vincent Descombes puts it: 'It contains an element of risk and adventure, it endangers the thinker's very person, his identity and reaches far beyond the generally accepted measure of good and evil'. 17 Here, Truth and Morality are not grounded in a philosophical will to know (the understanding of Being) but in an action-oriented desire for knowledge where: 'The true is the outcome' and sinful action is forgiven by its success, just, as in Foucault 'Truth is that which functions as the truth' or 'for something to be true it must already be in the true'.lS The philosophies of Being, Time and Ontology are supplanted in Foucault by the genealogy of the event and the situation. The philosophical is subordinated to the historical, but not in a way in which the historical itself becomes an absolute, raised to a transcendental principle. It was around this reversal that Foucault had much admiration for Hyppolite's encounter with Hegel. In the fragile and multiple events of history and politics, philosophy itself has little place to aspire to an absolute consciousness. To engage with Hegel, therefore, in the Hyppolitian sense is to demonstrate the very folly and risk that philosophy encounters in imagining for itself a Voice that
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speaks for the Infinite or the Eternal, when in fact the fragile events of culture, and the way thought is divided and contained by them constantly remind philosophy of its own Event- that of a discursive theatre. 19 In Hyppolite's teaching, philosophy had become, according to Foucault, 'that which could be rejected by the extreme irregularity of experience'. 20 Philosophy as the thought of an inaccessible totality disappears. It is revealed, by this teaching, to be nothing more than the endless interrogation of the events of popular memory, life and death and those instances of culture that are so often assigned to the non-philosophical. It was Hyppolite's refusal to make of Hegel a philosopher of the absolute, that was so attractive to Foucault. In this, Hyppolite shared with Kojeve an atheistic anthropology, which, whilst often leading to Marx, as frequently led to Heidegger and Nietzsche. But more striking continuities between Kojeve and Hyppolite can be found in a repetition of interpretive themes in the Phenomenology which lend themselves more fully to anti-humanist and anti-historicist appropriations: the preoccupation with negating negativity and an ethos of permanent critique,21 the development of trans-individual notions of desire coming out of the master-slave dialectic, and finally, the contention that alienation is not, as humanism would see it, an aberrant condition, but a productive and universal'eternal return' of alterity in the present. 22 On this last aspect, I would argue that Foucault had taken from Hyppolite and ultimatelyfromKojeve, the idea thatthehumansubject, 'by objectifying itself in culture ... becomes other than itself, and discovers in this objectification an insurmountable degeneration which it must nevertheless try to overcome. This is a tension inseparable from existence'. 23 It is in relation to this tension, which can also be viewed positively as the affirmation of an anthropology without a subject, that I will also argue that, throughout his intellectual work, Foucault became interested in an empirical anthropology for which he transposed the philosophical anthropologies of Hyppolite. This trend in Foucault's thought, which led him to declare in 1982 that it was not power, but the subject, that was the central concern of his work, drew himintoanambivalentrelationwithacontemporarythinkerwhoseinterest was also in an empirical anthropology of the subject and who also embraced Hegelian readings of desire- Jacques Lacan. Lacan was perhaps the most famous disciple of Kojeve's lectures in the 1930s which were also attended by thinkers of alterity including Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alexandre Koyre Pierre Klossowski, and Raymond Queneau. It is now commonplace for commentaries on Lacan to document the way Kojeve's reading of specular Desire had influenced Lacan's models of subjectivity. It is beyond the scope of this paper to investigate these influences, although, in passing we can mention the links that have been sketched between Lacan's notion of 'transitivism' (as a function of what he calls the mirror phase) and Kojeve's focus on the 'pure concept of recognition'. One also notes their common preoccupation with Desire as a function of alterity, and even Kojeve' s notion of 'the Real as that which resists' and Lacan's paradoxical notion of the real.
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What I want to single out here, however, is how Lacan's concern for an empirical anthropology, shares with Foucault, a concern for the priority of alterity over identity, which is also a concern for understanding the ways in which the human subject necessarily mis-recognises its historical agency as natural. It is not to argue that Foucault and Lacan are interested in the death of the subject, as if illusion were related to substance, rather their projects consist of positively evoking the complexity of the subject in forms of alterity and contradiction which problematise the subject. In this, Foucault conjoins his own project with that of Lacan's over the problematic of the subject in an interview with an Italian newspaper, conducted shortly after Lacan's death in 1980 where he remarks: We discovered that philosophy and the human sciences lived on a very traditional conception of the human subject... we discovered that it was necessary to attempt to free everything that was hidden behind the apparently simple use of the pronoun 'I', the subject is a fragile complex thing about which it is so difficult to speak, and without which we cannot speak at all.24
Foucault celebrates Lacan's very style, which he said resisted the attempts to reduce the complexity of the subject: [Lacan] wanted that the reading of his texts were not simply a 'prise de conscience' of his ideas. He wanted that the reader would discover himself as a subject of desire through such reading. [He] wanted that the obscurity of his writings would reveal the very complexity of the subject.
For both Foucault and Lacan the repression of specular forms of desire as a basis for epistemology is enshrined in the human sciences which have invariably sought to banish the emergence of alterity in the formation of subjectivity, by essentialising forms of subjected individuality. In the case of Lacan, this tradition is highlighted by the confessional metaphysics of egopsychology,25 and in Foucault's case by European humanism. Humanism invented a whole series of subjected sovereignties: the soul (ruling the body, but subjected to God), consciousness (sovereign in a context of judgment, but subjected to the necessities of truth), the individual (a titular control of personal rights subjected to the laws of nature and society), basic freedom (sovereign within, but accepting the demands of an outside world and aligned with destiny). In short, humanism is everything in Western civilisation that restricts the desire for power, it prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized. 26 The various modes of subjection which Foucault sketches coincide with the formation of the subject as a psycho-philosophical construct in the early seventeenth century, a new experience based on the moi- Descartes' 'soul', Pascal's 'hateful self' or Kant's 'transcendental ego', which emerged at the beginning of the Enlightenment.27 Lacan himself argues that the moi as consciousness of individual experience, has not always been synonymous with 'the subject', whose 'inaugural moment' he dates also from the beginning of the seventeenth century.2s Psychologisms and sociologisms of the subject are criticised by both Lacan and Foucault, because of the way they effectively take situational power relationships and naturalise them as universal ones - in Lacan's criticism, subordinating psychoanalytic categories to philosophical ones.
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This particular practice is a defining trait of metaphysical anthropologies, whose powers of definition represents, for Foucault, 'man' as 'speaking for others', whilst for Lacan it is blatant dishonesty as opposed to the asymptotic 'truth' of the ex-centricity of Being in the unconscious. 29 Whilst Foucault and Lacan reject and rehistoricise metaphysical anthropologies of the subject they are interested in the category of the subject in terms of the modes in which it is empirically and historically constructed. Insofar as the subject, as anthropos, as spirit, as self-consciousness, has never existed except through the being-centred fantasias of philosophical discourse, their approach is anti-foundational. But insofar as human beings consistently misrecognise their historical agency as 'natural', Foucault and Lacan seek to provide foundational and quasi-anthropological explanations as to why this is so. The implications of these divergent commitments involved in a theory of the subject mean that the structure of the subject itself cannot be adequately studied from either a foundational or anti-foundational standpoint but necessitates an interminable equivocation, an always-suspended tension between the two. The oscillation between the foundational and antifoundational expresses itself in a similar ambivalence toward appealing to general conditions over particular ones. As opposed to foundational being-centred and speculative approaches, Foucault and Lacan, in different ways, privilege the particular. Foucault's enthusiasm for linguistic psychoanalysis in The Order of Things is an exemplary instance of this, namely, that psychoanalysis cannot be deployed as pure speculative knowledge or as a general theory of man.... All analytic knowledge is thus invincibly linked with a praxis, with that strangulation produced by the relation between two individuals, one of whom is listening to the other's language, thus freeing his desire from the object it has lost... This is why nothing is more alien to psychoanalysis than anything resembling a general theory of man or an anthropology.3o
Lacan's claim that 'psychoanalysis is a science of the particular' can be viewed in the light of his remark that the term 'world-view' is antithetical to psychoanalytic discourse and that all 'philosophical ologies (onto, theo, cosmo and psycho alike) contradict the basic tenet of the existence of the unconscious'. 31 In order to approach a sensibility of the particular, therefore, neither Foucault or Lacan are concerned so much with a Copernican unseating of the Subject-in-general from the locus of meaning and action, as with the ways in which subjects are constituted as subjects, in complex relations of reciprocal recognition, where 'subjectivity' is endlessly displaced along relations of power and signification. Their respective work on power and the subject proposes to reveal the localised forms in which 'subjectivity' is constituted as in a sense 'transindividual'. Subjects do not 'speak' language anymore than they' exercise' power. There are no pregiven subjects to speak of without speaking of these modes of constitution. Subjects are nothing outside of these relations such that to 'know' the subject implied by them is to be implicated in them. The problematic of the subject of Wisdom, the subject on the way to a finite knowledge, is for Foucault and Lacan a scandalous fiction.
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For both Lacan and Foucault the possibility of agency or substance is irredeemably bound up with the fact that subjects and objects are only ever effects, real and imagined, of constitutive processes that always precede them in the manner of an always-already. This peculiar kind of historicity is not a free-floating phenomenon, but is grounded in reflexive recognition structures which transcend and contain the subject. There are no pre-given subjects with an experience of the real, rather, subjects become what they are through definite structures of recognition, and because of this, Lacan and Foucault both insist, in the manner of Kojeve and Hyppolite, that selfconsciousness is impossible in its constituent form, because the self is only ever a moment in a process of endless self-objectification in otherness, what in Kojeve is designated as generalised alterity. Foucault's commitment to this metaphysics of alterity which I have been outlining, and which underwrites his progressive interest in an empirical anthropology led to a shifting and ambivalent relation to Lacan across the archaeological, cartographic and neo-ethical phases of his work which often involved the question of whether Lacanian thought was to be included in his critiques of psychoanalysis. During his archaeological phase, Foucault is concerned to pinpoint those internal forms of Western knowledge which analytically undermine anthropological conceptualisations of human culture, thereby 'reversing' the analytic of finitude. It is here that Foucault claims that the emergence of linguistics, ethnology and linguistic psychoanalysis, in particular, began to demonstrate the untenable nature of philosophical anthropologies, and arrive at ontological questions which would lead 'the other positive sciences back to their epistemological bases'. 32 It is from the point in Foucault's own historical survey of this crucial fold in the positive human sciences that, I would argue, following the work of Peter Cotton,33 Foucault increasingly conceptualises the subject as an empirical ontology, rather than simply an organising principle for regimes of truth. In doing so, Foucault begins a relationship with linguistic psychoanalysis, and its Lacanian particularism, that was to structure and preoccupy his work on the subject for the remainder of his writings. Following the positive discussions of linguistic psychoanalysis in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault completely displaced his appraisal of psychoanalysis as a counter-science by a new project of historicising psychoanalysis as a vast technology of the psyche. About Freudian psychoanalysis in general, Foucault aims his criticism, throughout his analytic of power, towards its inability to account for its own historical and political status, and its technical operation as a primary agency for the constitution of a secret psychological self. In charting the emergence of this new form of a deep desiring-self in The History ofSexuality Volume 1, as a bio-product of various pastoral incitements to the 'power over life', Foucault nevertheless distinguishes between psychoanalysis as a technology of constituting a secret self, and psychoanalysis as a meta-theoretical critique of naturalistic conceptions of desire. In discussing the objectives of rethinking the repressive hypothesis, Foucault in fact compares his own model of power with that which can be contributed, 'from another quarter and doubtless in a more radical fashion: a critique
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conducted at the level of a theory of desire'. 34 He says that he bases his central arguments in The History of Sexuality Volume 1 on the disqualification of the repressive hypothesis, while 'feigning ignorance' of the existence of this more radical critique. In point of fact, the assertion that sex is not 'repressed' is not altogether new. Psychoanalysts have been saying the same thing for some time. They have challenged the simple little machinery that comes to mind when one speaks of repression; the idea of a rebellious energy that must be throttled has appeared to them inadequate for deciphering the manner in which power and desire are joined to one another. 35 Cotton summarises this declaration as a dilemma for Foucault: 'On the one hand, Foucault is unequivocal that classical psychoanalysis is the paradigmatic confessional technology. Yet he possibly wants to exempt 'certain psychoanalytic investigations' from genealogical critique. According to Cotton, Foucault wishes to keep a distance from Lacan's thought only because he is uncertain about how to contextualise it. 36 Consequently, this uncertainty expresses itself in an ambivalence about the direction of his entire project, resulting in an almost unrecognisable leap in the approaches taken in the first and second volumes of the History of Sexuality. Foucault's shift to the study of modes of self-constitution, which materialises from the publication of The Use of Pleasure onwards, sets a stage for a renewed critique as well as an obvious ambivalence toward Lacanian psychoanalysis. The idea of self-constitution, what Foucault describes as subjectivisation, implicitly deals with a rather gaping lacuna in his analytic of power; the fact that in constructing an alternative to foundationalism he has collapsed historical modes of constituting and regulating the subject into the one moment, which beckons a return of the mystery-effect of the subject's pre-constitution. It is in the preface to The Use of Pleasure that Foucault confronts this issue most fully redefining his account of the subject as a 'third shift', a move necessitated by the need to break away from the conceptualisations of desire that had come to be associated with his genealogies of power relations. At this point, Foucault actually concedes the framing role of Lacanian notions of desire for his account of power, and the dilemma he faced in breaking with them.37 He grants that the concept of 'the desiring subject constituted, if not a theory, then a generally accepted frame', allowing that because he was not able to historicise the Lacanian formulation of desire, it had allowed his appropriation of this frame to be mistaken for naturalistic conceptions of desire and a foundational approach to the subject. 38 At the same time, Foucault recognised that his theory of power, whilst providing a useful tool kit for the analysis of concrete instances of the regulation and normalisation of subjectivities, could not explain the historical constitution of agency in the mode of substance as a precondition of the circulation of disciplinary procedures and regulatory forms of power. So much so, that for the first time ever, in the introduction to The Use ofPleasure, Foucault deploys the term 'being' in the vocabulary of the de jure, rather than the defacto, where he remarks that in choosing to chart the slow formation of a hermeneutics of self rather than a 'history of desiring man', he is concerned with 'the
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games of truth and error through which being is historically constituted as experience'. 39 But here, and in a number of interviews he gave at this time, Foucault does not designate a constituent version of being, but an empirical anthropology based around the reflectivity of self to self. Foucault remarks, in a late seminar on the self, that he had 'insisted too much on the technology of domination and power', and has become more interested in the interaction between oneself and others, and in technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself or herself, in a technology of self. It is in this very late period in his work that Foucault proposes to rewrite his entire project in terms of this new ontology: 'my own problem has always been the question of truth, of telling the truth... and the relation between "telling the truth" and forms of reflexivity, of self upon self'. 40 So, whilst Foucault is still interested in the constitution of the subject as a metaphysical identity, it is for him, nevertheless, the ontological outcome of a definite anthropogenic structure of recognition which is grounded in the particular rather than the universal. 41 What Foucault designates as the constitution of the self, through games of truth, has little to do with the positions of the subject, but of a subjective structure for which substance is merely an illusory repression of the emergence of alterity, byway of the reflexivity of self to self. In speaking of reflexivity here, in his last interviews, Foucault articulates more concretely the ontological commitments to an empirical anthropology with which he had been working in his post-archaeological projects although he has shifted his metaontology from relations of power to relations of truth and the ethical constitution of the self. In conclusion, I would like to restate the thesis that, from his cartographic period onwards, Foucault never departed from an analysis of the subject that began in the particular. In this he shared Lacan's sentiment that 'the idea of a unifying unity to the human condition has always had the effect on me of a scandalous lie'. From the position of the particular, and of the recognition structures grounded in Hegelian models of alterity, Lacan and Foucault generate analyses which are positive rather than negative critiques of a totalising anthropologism. Their positivity derives not from epistemological principles but from a permanent and active discourse that the structures of subjectivity and experience are of a form that ontologically resist totalisa tion. 1 Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard, North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991, p.l. 2 Kojeve's reading of Hegel can be found in Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. J. Nichols Jr., New York, Basic Books, 1969. In what has been described as the second Hegel renaissance in France, Jean Hyppolite also espoused the anthropological version of Hegel. In his Existential Marxism in Postwar France, Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1975, Mark Poster claims that Hyppolite 'taught the French to look at the magisterial unfolding of the historical shapes of consciousness for the secret of a new philosophical anthropology' (p.19). Those who attended Hyppolite's lectures included Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and Derrida. Foucault, for one, not only attended Hyppolite's lectures but dedicates his work to him in his inaugural address to the College de France claiming that
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'I have borrowed both the meaning and the possibility of what I am doing from him'. 'The Discourse on Language', The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London, Tavistock, 1972, p.237. As Mark Poster has noted: 'Hyppolite directed his students to the Phenomenology,not only in his lectures but even in his work on Hegel's Logic' (Poster, Existential Marxism p.19). Kojeve and Hyppolite were the only French intellectuals to translate the Phenomenology into French, Kojeve in part and Hyppolite in the form of the first full edition. Hyppolite's anthropological interpretation of Hegel is best represented by the following works: Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Hegel and Marx, trans. J. 0' Neill, London: Heineman, Basic Books, 1969, and Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, trans. S. ChemiakandJ. Heckman, Evanston: Northwestem University Press, 1974. See especially Kojeve, 'The Dialectic of the Real and The Phenomenological Method in Hegel', ch. 7 of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 1969. Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', afterword to Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982, p.222. Foucault, 'Structuralism and Post-structuralism'. Interview with Gerard Raulet, Telos no. 55, Spring 1983, p.208. Foucault, The Subject and Power, 1982, p.225. Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Hegel and Marx, 1969, p.161 Ibid, p.162. Hyppolite's lectures were well attended by Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and Derrida; Hyppolite supervising Foucault's doctoral thesis on Kant. Foucault, The Discourse on Language, 1972. Foucault writes: 'dialectics does not liberate differences; it guarantees, on the contrary, that they can always be recaptured. The dialectical sovereignty of similarity consists in permitting differences to exist, but always under the rule of the negative, as an instance of non-being. They may appear as the subversion of the Other, but contradiction secretly assists in the salvation of identities'. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Donald, F. Bouchard (ed.),trans. Donald. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986pp.184-5. Foucault, The Discourse on Language, 1972, p.235. Foucault, 'Final Interview', Interview with Gilles Barbadette and Andre Scala, Raritan, Summer 1985, p.99. Foucaultremarksthatthemoreintensely a thinker's work figures as an instrument of thought in his own work, the less inclined he is to write about them directly. I have never written anything on Heidegger, and I wrote only a small article on Nietzsche. Ibid, p.9. We might add that Foucault has never penned an essay on either Hegel or Marx either. Even into the 1980s, Foucault could be heard Hegelianising Nietzsche, and embracing contradiction as the generalised possibility of discourse and action: 'I try to see, on a number of points, and to the extent that it is possible, with the aid of Nietzsche's texts- but also with anti-Nietzschean theses (which are nevertheless Nietzschean)- what can be done in this or that domain', Ibid, p.9. See, for example, Hyppolite, Logique et Existence: Essai sur La Logique de Hegel, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953, p.243. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding. London: Cambridge University Press, 1986, originally published in French as Le Meme et L'Autre (The Same and the Other), 1979, p.14. Foucault, The Discourse on Language, 1972
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19 Like Hyppolite, whose chair he succeeded at the College de France, Foucault was careful to identify himself as an historian of philosophical systems and texts rather than a historian or philosopher of ideas. Foucault renamed his chair at the college: Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. 20 Foucault, The Discourse on Language, 1972, p.236. 21 Hegel's philosophy is a philosophy of negation and of negativity' Logique et existence, 1953, p.135. 22 As Mark Poster puts it, for Hyppolite; 'because self-consciousness always required self-objectification, alienation was a timeless quality of the human condition', Poster, Existential Marxism, 1975, p.120. 23 Hyppolite, Studies on Hegel and Marx, 1969, p.87. 24 Foucault, 'Lacan, il Liberatore della psicanalisi', Carriere Della Sera, 11th September 1981. 25 For a review of Lacan's anti-academic and anti-philosophical vehemence towards ego-psychology, see David Macey, Lacan in Contexts. London, Verso, 1988, pp.ll0-11. 26 Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice, 1986, pp.221-2. 27 Macey, Lacan in Contexts, 1988, p.92. 28 Ibid, p.93. Lacan's claim should also be set beside his comment that psychoanalysis would have been impossible were it not for the Freudian Cogito. 29 With Lacan this ex-centricity is represented by Freud's discovery of the unconscious as 'the discourse of the Other'.lt points to 'the self's radical ex-centricity to itself with which man is confronted, in other words, the truth discovered by Freud'. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1980, p.171. Foucault and Lacan's anti-universalist situationism here is comparable with the way in which, for Kojeve, self-consciousness is only a 'situational' resolution of the dialectic, a moment of imaginary misrecognition which can nevertheless acquire all of the force of a 'final state'. Such imaginary resolutions occurring as a ruse of Semblance, are moments when Hegel becomes the most political (crystallised in his ideology of the transcendence of the Prussian State). Semblance is not to be equated with an illusory reality, rather it is the production of a 'false' terminus in the dialectic which in political terms may be Real, All Too Real. 30 Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock, 1985, p.376. 31 Cited in Macey, Lacan in Contexts, 1988,p.81. 32 Foucault, The Order of Things, 1985, p.379. 33 Peter Cotton, 'Foucault and Psychoanalysis',Arena: New Series, no.1, 1993, pp. 63105. This article charts Foucault's position in relation to individually-centred experiences of selfhood, from the time of his Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987, and his Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger's Dreams and Existence, to The Care of the Self Cotton does so by way of a Heideggerian reference which is interested in 'the question of the ontic-psychological status of the human self vis-a-vis the process of world constitution' (p.73). Cotton wishes to ask of Foucault: 'Is the self a wholly constituted product of socio-historical processes, an epiphenomenon of shifting cultural forms, or is it a dimension of the human self implicated at a core constitutive level -however this might be conceived?' (p.73). 34 Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984,p.81. 35 Ibid. 36 Cotton, Foucault and Psychoanalysis,1993, p.89. At this time Foucault refused to comment on his, his only known discussion with a Lacanian analyst, JacquesAlain Miller, being one in which he refused to demarcate definitive positions.
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37 As Cotton points out, in The Use of Pleasure, Foucault refers to La can as 'the man of desire', See Cotton, Foucault and Psychoanalysis, 1993, p.94. 38 Foucault once defined humanism as everything that restricted the productive side of the 'desire for power', Language, Counter-memory, Practice, 1986, p.221. 39 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality Volume 2. London: Penguin, 1988, p.6. 40 Foucault, 'Structuralism and poststructuralism', 1983, p.204 (my emphasis). 41 Certainly these statements about the ontology of self-constitution are a long way from his 1971 comment that: 'Nothing in man- not even his body- is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men'. Language, Counter-memory, Practice, p.153.
Cathexis: Metaphorics of Power 'Tony '11iwaites Power is not simply a set of mechanisms or institutions whose purpose is to ensure our subservience; neither is it subjugation according to rule; neither is it a top-down domination of one group over another. Foucault says as much, as we all already know, in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. It is in the chapter called simply 'Method', right at the beginning of the second chapter in Part Four, 'The Deployment of Sexuality', where Foucault starts laying down those meticulous methodological guidelines which are so much a feature of his work since The Archaeology ofKnowledge. I am sure it is the most frequently cited chapter of the whole book. What I want to draw attention to, however, is the rider which immediately follows that celebrated set of reversals: 'The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes'.l These may be forms power comes to take on, but they are not its primary mechanisms. Foucault's work is not a denial of the state, or its effectivity, so much as an attempt not to take it for granted as an explanatory force. This, I think, is very often glossed over entirely, so Foucault's work is often read in quite contradictory ways by many of his critics. Two of the most frequent complaints about Foucault's analysis of power are, after all, that on the one hand, in his flight from the bad totalising state he is forced to fall back on a complete atomisation of power into the haphazard of strategy; and, on the other hand, that his picture of power as something in which the entire socius bathes, with no simple outsides, means that it is, on the contrary, an all too fearfully monolithic and seamless 'total system'.2 The two arguments may seem opposed, but they often occur in the same text, flipping like the Slothrop of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow between paranoia and anti-paranoia: everything connects, nothing connects, to much the same paralytic effect. 3 It may be somewhere other than in the space offered by those two nostalgic false alternatives of individual self-determination and cybernetic social determinism, that questions of agency might begin to emerge.
Super-ego Let me for a moment move very fast through some complex arguments, at the risk of grossly oversimplifying things. In the later Freud, the superego comes to represent one of the most obvious points of the subject's embedment in the social. The earlier concept of the ego-ideal, which figures so largely in the papers on narcissism and mourning of the mid 1910s,4 is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, it is largely projective, working from the inside out: in the melancholic, the depressive, 'one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object'. 5 On the other hand, it is also introjective, from the outside in:
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melancholia arises in the first place because an object- a real object, out there beyond the subject - has been lost, and the response of ego has been to introject it where it can now serve as psychic object for all the affect which had previously been connected to that lost object. 6 By the time of The Ego and the Id (1923), the superego is emerging quite clearly as the site of an introjection not only of a real and highly cathected object, but of an immensely complex web of social relations: The superego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex is and the more rapidly it succumbs to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter is the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on- in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt.7 This is a weight the super-ego will come to take on increasingly in the later sociological speculation, such as the 1930 Civilization and its Discontents, where the establishment of the super-ego is precisely and explicitly what allows this internalisation of authority to take place.s Authority: as the prefix implies, means the super-ego watches from above; its function lies in 'keeping a watch over the actions and intentions of the ego and judging them, in exercising a censorship'; it works by coercion, fear of punishment, and above all by guilt; its 'aggressiveness ... keeps up the aggressiveness of the [external] authority': civilisation, in short, 'obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city'.9 All of these are terms of power, and of power as repression - in the Foucauldian rather than the Freudian sense this time. For Freud - or for a certain Freud - the superego is an intra- and supra-psychic domination, from the top down, which assures the psychic subservience of the citizens, whom it subjugates, subjects, through a rule sublimating and internalising a certain social violence. The very picture of what Foucault labels the repressive hypothesis of power. Except for two things: one of them (and here, once again, I'll move fast, sketching out an argument which needs the justice of detail) - one of these qualifications is that even in the later Freud, this process of superego-as-introjection is never unalloyed. It never works simply from the outside in. There is always something going the other way as well: According to one view, [the aggressive energy with which we suppose the super-ego to be endowed] merely carries on the punitive energy of the external authority and keeps it alive in the mind ... ; while, according to another view, it consists, on the contrary, of one's own aggressive energy which has not been used and which one now directs against that inhibiting authority.... The first view seemed to fit in better with the history, and the second with the theory, of the sense of guilt.lO
Elsewhere, the super-ego may be the introjected external authority, but it is also 'the representative of the internal world, of the id'. 11 For the superego, the direction is never just repressive. Even if Freud everywhere attempts to argue that these two directions nevertheless act in unison,12 the model remains inescapably dynamic: its outcome is the product of forces which may in principle be considerably askew, not sharing the same source
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or ends. The super-ego is never just introjective: despite appearances, it is never simply subsumable in what Foucault calls the 'repressive hypothesis' of power. Let us get ahead of ourselves, just a little: the super-ego may be one of those 'terminal forms' of power, but let us not take it for granted as any explanation: it may not, in itself, quite be power's mechanism within the psyche.
Cathexis The second of those two exceptions is the one on which I want to spend the most time here, still keeping Foucault in the vicinity. The super-ego is not the only point at which the Freudian topographies are embedded in the social, though it is one of the more obvious. Here, I want to suggest another such point, from which it will be possible first of all to ask some rather different questions about the Freudian subject and power, and then, turning things around, ask some questions about the concept of power itself and the ways in which it functions in discourse. And that brings me, at last, to the term which gives this paper its title. Cathexis: It is only in English that the term is such an obvious neologism. The term Freud uses is the quite ordinary German word Besetzung, though he uses it in a distinctly idiosyncratic way. (Its ordinary meanings include trimming, bordering, edging; occupation in the military sense; nomination to an office;fillingof a vacancy; distribution of parts; casting of a play). Freud resisted his English translator's Greek cathexis for years (or so Strachey says), but was eventually to use it himself in his article on psychoanalysis for the 1926 Encyclopedia Britannica.13 Cathexis or Besetzung, whether you read the English or the German Freud, it is everywhere, from the beginning to the end of his career, though almost everywhere it is entirely without definition. He seems to have first used it in the Studies on Hysteria and the abandoned 'Project for a Scientific Psychology'. Both of these are from 1895 (that is, from somewhere just approaching the middle of that long transferential relationship to Wilhelm Fliess which stands in for Freud's own crucial self-analysis), and both of them are texts which in which we can see what will become psychoanalysis still in the process of disengagement from other sorts of investigation (the psychiatric practice of Breuer, still largely based on hypnosis, and the 'Project's' attempted synthesis of psychology with the new discoveries of neurophysiology). And then, though these are the first occurrences of the name, the concept itself seems to have been around a bit longer.14 There is a paper on 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' from early in the previous year, 1894, which does not yet use the name but manages to give the closest Freud will ever get to a definition. It is a transitional paper like all the writings of this time, not yet quite psychoanalysis but no longer quite psychology either: a marginal bit of Freud, one of the pieces you do not find in the Penguin Freud. Tucked away in these margins, then, you find Freud's only explicit statement about what cathexis is- and even then, it is very brief. Here it is in its entirety, two short paragraphs at the very end of the paper, separated from the rest by a blank line:
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I should like, finally, to dwell for a moment on the working hypothesis which I have made use of in this exposition of the neuroses of defence. I refer to the concept that in mental functions something is to be distinguished- a quota of affect or a sum of excitation - which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have no means of measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body. This hypothesis, which, incidentally, already underlies our theory of' abreaction' ..., can be applied in the same sense as physicists apply the hypothesis of a flow of electric fluid. It is provisionally justified by its utility in coordinating and explaining a great variety of psychical states. 15
Cathexis stands at the gateway to psychoanalysis. It emerges as a concept at the very moment that psychoanalysis itself does. In these early articles, one can see psychoanalysis emerging from electro-neurological trappings, in a way which is increasingly metaphorical, less and less literal. Cathexis will gradually free itself from these too, but it will remain the underpinning of the entire venture of psychoanalysis: it will be the basis for the twin mechanisms of the dreamwork, condensation and displacement, from which point on it will remain untouched by the constant revisions of demarcation lines within and between unconscious and conscious, by the emergence in the 1920s of the ego/id/superego schema, or by the radical and speculative doubt of texts such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle and 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable'. Indeed, it is tempting to see cathexis as the psycho-analytical term par excellence, the term which more than any other makes psychoanalysis possible. The four fundamentals for Lacan may well be the unconscious, the drive, repetition and transference, but what is cathexis if not the very mechanism, the very possibility of these? 16
Metaphorics Cathexis has the electrical properties of the neurone as its model, though it is never- even in the 'Project', which is Freud at his most optimistically positivistic - itself an electrical phenomenon. From the beginning, cathexis is already a metaphor: affects are cathected from one idea to another just as electrical charges are distributed and redistributed over a surface. As a metaphor, cathexis is doubly a logic of exchange: on the one hand, the metaphor sets up an exchange between one system (psychic affect) and another (neural electrodynamics); on the other, it also pictures the system of psychic affect as itself an incessant exchange, in which a sexual anxiety, say, can be manifested in anything from an obsessive repetition to a fear of thunderstorms. Cathexis, we can say, both makes distinctions and connects the distinct, in the one doubled movement, or at least doubled. It provides a space in which disparates can coexist in a dynamic and not necessarily resolvable play of forces, while maintaining at the same time their separation (as it has to as part of its function of defence). It spills out everywhere into the metalevel as well, as the discursive space which the term produces- psychoanalysis- is precisely itself a cathected space. In this space, a number of discourses which may even have no place together (neuro-anatomy, physiology, fluid
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dynamics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, ethics and the arts) are drawn in a disjunct synthesis, signalled by relations of defence, strategy, management, antagonisms, ad hoc solutions. Cathexis cathects itself. Here, what I would really need to do would be to offer a thorough discussion of how that problematic of displacement, of metaphorics, is found throughout Freud's texts and at all levels. Cathexis begins by importing terms from neuroanatomy and fluid dynamics. In doing this, it provides at least two simultaneous narratives: one of them is a narrative of how the subject comes to be formed, in terms of homeostatic systems which have the organism seeking to minimise the unpleasure of perturbation; and the other, along with this, irreducible to it but entering into all sorts of exchanges with it, is a narrative of the formation of psychoanalysis itself, from discourses including those to which these homeostatic systems belong, or which have themselves borrowed them: physics, but also psychiatry, anatomy, neurology, sociology, literature and philosophy, to name only a few. 17 In this doubling, psychoanalysis becomes the name of an institution, with lateral links to all sorts of others (medical, legal, educational, archival and informational), none of which can be seen as outside the ambit of the subject, or of cathexis. In itself, cathexis is without definition, without quantity, yet it functions as if it were a quantity, as if defined: as if cathexis itself comes about in the very movement between things, in the transfer of something from one place to another, in the very (discursive) movement of psychoanalysis's disengagement of itself. As Laplanche and Pontalis point out in The Language of Psychoanalysis 18 cathexis may be a problem for definition, but it is next to indispensable for psychoanalysis. Theirjustificationforitis precisely Freud's for the hypothesis of the unconscious in the 1915 article on it: 19 its value as hypothesis is simply that it has a massive explanatory power. Like the unconscious, cathexis may not in its very nature be amenable to any sort of direct observation, but take it as hypothesis and suddenly a large number of hitherto separate and scattered data reveal themselves as linked in all sorts of ways. It is, in other words, economical (in doing a lot with a little) and economic (in that it exists only in exchange, as the possibility of relations among terms). Here again, let me move fast, and at the risk of appearing somewhat cryptic throw out a suggestion time will not let me elaborate on here; and that is, that I think this metaphoricity, this cathected metaphoricity, provides the very possibility ofFreudianmetapsychology. As exchange, cathexis most immediately provides an economic model of the psyche: the psyche acts as if it is the product of something quantifiable, which circulates, is distributed, charmelled, and is exchanged in various ways within and beyond its own system. What this 'something quantifiable' might be, is purely a product of the metaphor, and of that folding-back by which cathexis (metaphor to the end) describes its own meta-system. From this reflexive metaphoricity of cathexis, this general economy, come the other aspects of Freudianmetapsychology: a topography, a surface of elements related to each other by certain greater or lesser distances, and by adjacencies or separations; and across that surface, the psychic dynamic of pressures which,
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through the logic of breaching of Bahnung first suggested in the early quasineurological'Project', ensure that certain routes get laid down to direct such pressures and minimise disruption to the system as a whole. Through these routes, an intense exchange of affect takes place, according to the mechanisms Freud will later isolate as displacement and condensation. The topographic, the dynamic, the economic: with cathexis, the three components of an adequate metapsychological description of the psyche become possible.
Power Cathexis is rootless, a figure of exchange which produces certain effects of grouping, distribution, disjunction, space, dynamics. It names itself. The space it produces is a strategic space, utterly unlike and yet subtending the devolutionaryhanding-downofpowerwhichisthesuper-ego. Withcathexis, and precisely because of its awkwardness in any dimension except the metaphorical- precisely because it is the term, which more than any other of Freud's, resists being anything more than metaphor, which is to say it resists being anything but a figure of exchange- with cathexis, it may be possible to think of the relation of the subject to power in a very different way from that of the super-ego and the repressive hypothesis. Cathexis gives us a metaphorics of power precisely to the extent that that phrase is caught between subjective and objective genitives: power as metaphor, yes, but also metaphor as power, the very figure of power. As a strategic space, it is not too far from the sort of discursive space that Foucault traces out in The Archaeology of Knowledge, a discontinuous space of exchanges and uneven distributions. If the superego is, as Althusser hoped, that place where the subject is called from above by the systematicity of ideology, then cathexis is the writing of the subject into discourse, which is not a resolution, even an imaginary one, so much as a tort, a management of differends. Cathexis is a multiplicity of force relations, strategic, tacticat irreducible to a single system. As a general economy, it is always open to the unforeseeable, the perpetual aleatory remainder of all system which Lacan will call tuche, the throw of events. (Hence Freud's continual fascination with happenstance and the supernatural- not to mention the possibility of Jung.) Cathexis is of necessity an open-ended strategy of managing the unmanageable, a purposive calculation of interests which are not necessarily those of the subject which only begins to emerge in this very calculation: a logic of tactics. What this leads to, -to sum up briefly what has already been little more than a sketch- is the possibility of conceiving the relationship of Freud, the Freudian subject, to power, the politicat in a somewhat different way. Rather than a Freud who provides a model of the subject which can be seen as governed by a superego which is an internalisation of the sociat we have a Freud for whom the subject is somewhere in waiting, a sort of fable required for the working of a complex apparatus whose functioning is strategic rather than juridical. Here, I think, it is necessary to heed Foucault's warning: the superego is not simply some sort of myth, but a terminal form
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this other cathectic mechanism takes. Cathexis is always there from the beginning in the very places inhabited by the superego, subtending it. What I would like to suggest, at the moment as nothing more than a hypothesis is that such a mechanism suggests a way of conceiving agency which is somewhat different from that provided by the model of a subject called into social being through the superego. What would describe this cathectic subject is not so much Althusser plus Lacan, but a different set of tools altogether, a ragbag I will not even try to pretend forms a single whole: it may involve the language games of the later Wittgenstein, Lyotard's generic differends; Bourdieu's theories of practice, and the distinctions he makes between rules and regularities; and, of course, Foucault and the metaphorics of power. This is a metaphorics, I would suggest, because power exists only in that incessant exchange. As Foucault puts it in The History of Sexuality, following on immediately after that rider I began by citing, power exists only 'as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organisation'. It is 'the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another', of which power would be the 'immediate effect'.20 Or, as he puts it elsewhere: The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist.21 1
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980, p.92. My emphasis.
2
The term is Fredric Jameson's, from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981, p.90.
3
Here, ideally, I would have an exhaustive reading of a number of Foucault's critics, including Jameson, Merod, Harvey and Said, the point of which would not so much be to defend Foucault as to trace through the ways in which such arguments the1nselves implement that flipping between too much and too little, the macro and the lnicro, the system and the strategy.lt should be obvious from the switch into footnote mode that I am not even going to attempt that here. Let me cite only one example, to stand for many: Jim Merod tends to see the result of an actual Foucauldian politics as a fragmentation of interests with little, if anything, in common, futilely opposed by 'the infinite, scattered power of intellectuals and revolutionaries, without any integrating force or focus, against the infinitely dispersed but nonetheless localized and integrated power of econolnic exploitation, class oppression, state oversight, and disciplinary regulation in schools, laboratories, homes, and elsewhere' (Merod, The Political Responsibility of the Critic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p.170; in particular, seechapter7, 'On the Political Use of Critical Consciousness'). See also Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, pp.90-93; David Harvey, The Condition ofPostmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins ofCultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, particularly inch. 3, 'Postmodernism'; Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
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Sigmund Freud, 'On Narcissism: An Introduction', On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, pp.65-97; 'Mourning and Melancholia', On Meta-psychology, pp.25168.
5
Freud, 'Mourning and Melancholia', p.256.
6
Ibid, p.258.
7
Freud, The Ego and the Id, On Metapsychology, p.374.
8
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, New York: Norton, 1961, p.72.
9
Ibid, pp.83, 74, 70-71.
10 Ibid, pp.84-5. 11 Freud, The Ego and the Id, p.376. 12 Freud continues, immediately after the last passage cited: 'Closer reflection has resolved this apparently irreconcilable contradiction almost too completely; what remained as the essential and common factor was that in each case we were dealing with an aggressiveness which had been displaced inwards. Clinical observation, moreover, allows us in fact to distinguish two sources for the aggressiveness we attribute to the super-ego; one or the other of them exercises the stronger effect in any given case, but as a general rule they operate in unison'. (Civilization and its Discontents, p.85) 13 See the entry for 'cathexis' in J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac Books, 1988 [1973], pp.62-5, Greek cathexein, to occupy. 14 Ibid, p.62. 15 Sigmund Freud, 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence', The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications, London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974, pp.60-l. 16 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. 17 See Jacques Derrida, 'To Speculate- on 'Freud", The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 18 Laplanche and Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis, p.65. 19 Sigmund Freud, 'The Unconscious', On Metapsychology, pp.167-222. 20 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, pp.92, 94. 21 Michel Foucault,' Afterword: The Subject and Power', in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp.219-20.
Part Six Feminism
Foucault's ./Care of the Self': Some Implications for Feminist Politics
!Moya .Lfoya As feminist notions of the unified subject 0N oman) come under threat from both within and outside of feminism, the whole relationship between the feminist agent and feminist politics comes under scrutiny. Acceptance of the fragmented or polysemous nature of female subjectivity, of necessity, problematises traditional understandings of the connections between the subject and politics raising additional questions about the nature of autonomy or agency. One reaction amongst feminists to the kind of investigation of feminist politics which fractures the notion of collective action, unity amongst or between sisters (albeit differentially constituted sisters), has been to ditch the notion of constitutiveness. Thus as Christine di Stefano argues: if feminists adopt the idea of 'mobile subjectivity' (Ferguson:1993) 'any semblance of feminist politics [becomes] impossible' (1991) for feminism requires a stable constituency. Hitherto much of this debate around the subject and politics within feminism has remained locked into a logic that assumes that the only kind of viable feminist politics is one that can speak of and to the experiences of a previously defined group of women. It operates within a logic of identity that aims to fix, in advance, the features that signify group membership. It operates, as Judith Butler notes, with both presentist and descriptivist assumptions; that is, it attempts to make a description of the traits presently shared by individuals the foundations of political coherence (1993:221). However, as the work of Michel Foucault has graphically demonstrated, attempts to fix identity work by exclusion, normalisation (identarian politics are not merely descriptive but also prescriptive/normative), and the production of a realm of abjection (Butler 1992, 1993; Flax 1992). The signal failure of feminism to identify traits that can incorporate all women adds weight to the idea that a rethinking of notions of female I feminine subjectivity is required. But it also begs another question about the relationship between the subject and politics. As Judith Butler observes: To claim that politics requires a stable subject is to claim that there can be no political opposition to that claim. Indeed, that claim implies that a critique of the subject cannot be politically informed critique but, rather, an act which puts in jeopardy politics as such. To require the subject means to foreclose the domain of the political, and that foreclosure, installed analytically as an essential feature of the political, enforces the boundaries of the domain of the political in such a way that that enforcement is protected from political scrutiny (1992:4, original emphasis).
This debate, if it is to escape the aporia within which it is presently confined, needs to ask at least two kinds of question: first (and here I am borrowing from Jane Flax) 'What kind(s) of subjectivities can demand and support feminist politics?' (1992:446). What kind, that is, other than the
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supposedly necessary (and axiomatic) stable female/feminine subject? And, second, what kinds of feminist politics could they demand? The aim of this paper is to explore the kinds of feminist politics made possible through an adoption of a Foucauldian (style) ethics. In so-doing I will be reading Judith Butler's notion of gender performativity as an example of a feminist stylistics of existence against a series of criticisms posed by Lois McNay in her recent book Foucault and Feminism (1992). Feminist attention to the work of Michel Foucault has tended to focus on his middle works - those genealogies of prisons and sexuality where he deploys his radical analytic of power and where he excavates the various ways in which both bodies and selves are produced by power (Diamond and Quinby 1988; Sawicki 1991). Comparatively little feminist interest has been shown in his later ethical works (McNay 1992; Probyn 1993). However, it is these later works that furnish the clearest indication of the types of 'political' activity that polysemous subjects might conceivably engage in. In particular,IwillarguethatFoucault'slaterworkoffersatleasttwopossiblepolitics: politics as critique, or what Hennessy (in a non-Foucauldian context) calls 'critiqu(al) politics'; and politics as an 'ethics' or 'stylis tics' of existence- the so-called 'care of the self' referred to in the title of this paper. Without overstating the lines of either continuity or discontinuity between them, I want to argue that both are underwritten by the concept of transgression: transgression of the boundaries of discursive constitution, (self)understanding, and disciplinary or governmental practices. While critique offers a mode of challenging the 'historical ontology of ourselves', those factors which define 'what we are saying, thinking, and doing' (1984:44-5), enabling subjects to push up against the limits set by (this arbitrary and contingent) historical constitution, politics as ethics (in Foucault's sense) presents a practical means of reinventing the self. It furnishes a set of practices for self-subjectification, or what Foucault alternatively calls a 'technology of the self' (in Martin 1988:18). Leaving aside questions about the coherence of Foucault's oeuvre as a whole, it is clear that there is a shift in emphasis from the genealogical to the ethical works. Why this shift occurs is a matter of debate, but it is clear that one of the effects of turning to 'technologies of the self' is to expose certain ways in which the' government of individualisation' discussed in Discipline and Punish and in volume one of The History of Sexuality can (potentially) be subverted (1982:212). As Foucault observes in 'The Subject and Power', the current economy of power relations: applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorises the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches himself to his identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects (1982:212).
It is this binding of the individual to the 'truth' of his/her identity that is especially problematic for Foucault, for it is this that permits the' simultaneous individualisationand totalisation of modern power structures' (1982:216). It is this that ensnares and subjugates the individual. Foucault's response to this double bind is to suggest that individuals should engage in a politics of
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refusal: to 'refuse what we are', to refuse the 'kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries' (and which is encapsulated in the sexual subject). But refusal alone is not sufficient; in addition 'we have to promote new forms of subjectivity' (1982:216). In order, to evade the ever more invasive reaches of modem power, Foucault contends that subjects contest the terms of their identity and develop alternative modes of subjectification. It is in this latter context that the idea of 'the ethic of care as a practice of freedom' appears (1988). But exactly what is at stake in 'technologies of the self'? What kinds of ethical work is Foucault proposing? I want to begin to answer these questions by looking first at the essay 'What is Enlightenment?' In this essay, Foucault attributes to Kant a particular innovation: the importation into philosophy of a concern with what he earlier calls 'the history of the present' (1979:31). This 'attitude of modernity' represents a mode of relating to' contemporary reality', not on the basis of metahistorical continuity or the promise of teleological conclusion, but in terms of difference, the difference that 'today introduce[s] with respect to yesterday' (1984:34). In particular, the attitude of modernity contains not only a relationship to the present, but more importantly here 'a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself' (1984:41). This mode of relating to oneself, which Foucault terms an ethos or 'historical ontology of ourselves' (1984:45), comprises three features: a 'limit-attitude', experimentation, and, what I will call, constant vigilance. Foucault is clear that by 'limit-attitude', he does not mean a gesture of rejection, rather a constant questioning of the boundaries of identity. Thus the critic ferrets out 'whatever is singular, contingent... the product of arbitrary constraint'. Critique, thus, becomes: a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognise ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying... this criticism is not transcendental .. .it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think (1984:45-6, my emphasis).
This 'historico-critical attitude' involves more than simple reflexivity. It also invites transgression and experimentation (1984:48). It requires that individuals identify both possible points of and particular forms of selftransformation. It engenders practices of self-invention and self-creation. It is, in essence, an account of self-stylisation. Finally, Foucault is categoric that any such practices of self-transformation should be subject to constant vigilance for they are always localised, partial and potentially normalising. Such a philosophical ethos, then, is both critical/ theoretical and practical. While 'What is Enlightenment?' offers an overview of the relations between critique and askesis, it is in the later volumes of the History of Sexuality and the interviews on those texts, that Foucault's account of care of the self as an instance of freedom gets its fullest articulation. First, ethical work is an 'ascetical practice', not in the Sartrean sense of the attainment of authenticity, rather as an exercise of self upon self through which individuals attempt to transform themselves and their behaviour (1988:2). 1 Second, it is a 'practice of freedom'. By this, Foucault means something very specific:
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self-transformation is not an act of liberation, for that would connote the releasing of a pre-discursive subject from the strictures of oppression and the arrival at some end state of freedom as telos. Instead, although dependent on a certain degree of liberation- that is, the ability to affect relations of power (free individuals are those 'who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realised' (1982:221), practices of freedom are continuous, even never-ending. Freedom, thus becomes, for Foucault, an ethical problem. This ethical relation is also simultaneously an aesthetic relation: a mode of stylising one's life. Finally, ethics of self-care is also the foundation of care for others; by exercising self-mastery others can be protected from the abuse of power (1988:8). Foucault's ethical work thus results in a 'hermeneutics of the self' which, Probyn argues, entails a two-fold process: a theoretical formulation of the self, and a relation of the self to an ensemble of practices (1993: 122-3). For Foucault, one of the motivations for technologising the self, of transforming the self into, say, a work of art was that it has the potential to subvert or disrupt the regulatory mechanisms of governmentalising power. It offers a means of transgressing the boundaries of normative identity. It is in this context that the work of Judith Butler on gender is significant as an example of what a feminist stylistics might look like (Butler 1990b:139).2 Foucault wishes to resist the 'government of individualisation', those regulative practices that tie individuals to normative (and thus restrictive) identities. It is these identities that Foucault wishes individuals both to refuse, and to reinvent. One of the key concepts within feminist theory has been the notion of gender. Strong arguments have been presented for retaining gender as the primary focus of feminist analysis (albeit with some recognition of other structures of oppression) on the grounds that it is the codification and organisation of the world into a gendered hierarchy that explains women's oppression under patriarchy. Implicit in these claims is the acceptance of a binary structure to gender which maps onto a binary biology dividing the population into male/masculine-female/feminine subjects. Butler's argument in such texts as Gender Trouble (1990b) and Bodies That Matter 1993; see also 1990a, 1992) is that this binary framework within feminism itself helps to regulate and indeed to constitute or fix the very ontologies of gender that feminism is seeking to overcome. A feminism committed to picturing in advance those features of gendered identity that unite all women (such as the maternal body within French feminism, or reproduction and mothering within object relations theory) is, in effect, not describing a reality but establishing a normative, and thus exclusionary, injunction 'determining what qualifies as intelligible sex, invoking and consolidating the reproductive constraints on sexuality' thereby setting 'the prescriptive requirements whereby sexed or gendered bodies come into cultural intelligibility' (1990b:148). Such processes foreclose what counts as womanliness, a move which effectively discounts the experiences of certain other women (or non-women since they are outside the category established by a prior fixing of gendered attributes) positioning them beyond the realms of intelligibility or signification.
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It is at this point, I contend, that Foucault's notion of the politics of refusal is given expression. If we accept Butler's charge that gender is generally understood as the expression of some underlying identity, then it is this version of subjectivity that feminists must refuse and resist. This is precisely what Butler endeavours to do. In order for the expressive model of gender to work (as a descriptive ideal) all expressions of gender identity have to fall into two opposed camps: male vs. female. The problem with this cartography is that there are already a multiplicity of gender discontinuities fracturing the model: 'discontinuities which run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex' (1990b:l35). It is the proliferation of gender discontinuities which exposes the normative dimensions of the heterosexual matrix. So, in place of the idea of gender as expressive, Butler advances the idea of gender as performative. All those gestures, acts, desires that are taken as indicative of gender identity are revealed as so many fabrications 'manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means'. The supposed core of gender identity is disclosed as 'the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body' (1990a:336). There is no interior psychic space that determines identity; it is all the effect of 'corporeal signification'. To illustrate how performativity works, and how it unmasks the constitutive nature of gender, Butler examines the case of drag. Drag is presented by Butler as only one example of the ways in which gender transgression might work: it is illustrative rather than paradigmatic. Drag is emblematic of gender performativity insofar as it reveals the extent to which 'gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real' (1990b:x). The performance of the drag artist destabilises the distinctions between the 'natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates' (1990b:x). Drawing on the work of the anthropologist, Esther Newton, Butler notes the way in which, according to Newton, drag operates by a double inversion: first, in terms of appearance for the drag artist appears feminine on the outside at the same time that her /his essence or inside is masculine; and second, symbolically, the opposite inversion is at work: the body and gender is masculine while the essence (the 'me'?) is feminine. The performance of drag appears to operate via the distinction between the body of the performer (anatomically male) and the gender being performed (symbolically female). However, for Butler, a closer reading reveals three separate dimensions of 'significant corporeality': namely, anatomical sex, gender identity and gender performance (1990a:338). The distinctions between all three dimensions suggest, therefore, not only a dissonance between sex and performance, but also between sex and gender, and gender and performance. 'In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself- as well as its contingency' (1990a:338). What was previously assumed to be natural in gender identity is exposed as fabricated; it is denaturalised in the process of performance. This has a number of effects: first, it challenges the presumption of heterosexual coherence at the base of gender identification - the drag artist
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suggests the fluidity and contingency of gender positioning. Second, such parodic identities indicate (and here the possibility of alternative modes of self-subjectification are suggested) a 'perpetual displacement' which allows for the constant resignification and recon-textualisation of gender stylisation. 3 As a practice of freedom, then, parody has to be on-going: it is a process of continuous refusal and subversion. In addition, however, I want to contend that parodying gender also involves processes of selftechnologisation; that is, it is also productive. In the essay 'Technologies of the Self', Foucault defines this practice as one which permits: individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and a way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality (in Martin 1988: 18).
For feminists, this way of being is (in Butler's terms, at least) political: the rejection of a naturalised gender binarism. This rejection, or what might be called gender dissonance, functions primarily at the level of the body. Technologising the self, in this context, involves the development of a corporeal style. It consists in an '"act", as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where "performative" suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning'. Gender is thus a repeated performance- 'a stylized repetition of acts' (1990b:139)- which seeks to evade the false fixing of identity. It operates by continually destabilising and denaturalising gender expectations. It is, thus, a constant game of self-invention and reinvention; a continuous re-enactment of gender, a kind of 'improvisational theatre' (Segal et al. 1994:33) where the body is repeatedly remade or resignified. As with Foucault's own notion of ethical practice or askesis, these practices of self-formation are circumscribed to some degree: pure or extreme voluntarism in the presentation or production of the self is not possible. As Butler observes at the start of Bodies That Matter, her conception of the performativity of gender did not mean that 'one woke up in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night' (1993:x; see also Segal 1994:32), for that would imply an individual who could somehow step outside of its gender in order to don its gender. The being is always already interpellated by gender in some way; what is possible is that gender practices are a site of contestation and' critical agency', and that some degree of subversion, reformulation, slippage is possible. The fact that 'sex', 'gender' and 'sexuality' are forms of enforced cultural performance does not preclude the option of creating gender trouble. So, the broad context for Butler's work is a concern with the question of identity, and its place within feminist theory. By rendering untenable the possibility of stable identity Butler is also casting doubt on the politics of identity: the idea of female solidarity as the foundation of feminist emancipatory politics. Her aim is to show how the very indeterminacy of gender, far from heralding the failure of feminism as a politics, is a resource which
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feminists can use to expose the regulatory framework of compulsory heterosexuality. Her work, therefore, problematises the relationship between identity, agency, and emancipatory politics. In this section, I have explored some of the ways in which Butler's notion of gender performativity resembles Foucault's idea of the care of the self, and have demonstrated ways in which a feminist stylistics might operate as a feminist politics. In the next section I want to explore some of the criticisms levelled at Foucault by the feminist theoretician Lois McNay. Again, I will read Butler against Foucault. In her book Foucault and Feminism (1992), Lois McNay offers a series of criticisms concerning the proprieties of a feminist utilisation of Foucault's ethical works. In this final section of the paper I want to address a selection of them in relation to feminist politics.4 Her first objection is that Foucault's stress on practices of the self fails to differentiate between different practices of the self, such that each is seen to be equally valuable (1992:74). In particular, Foucault is condemned for not offering criteria to separate out those principles which are 'suggested' to individuals and those 'imposed' upon them. Without criteria for prioritising between practices, McNay argues, these practices cannot be unequivocally positioned as practices of freedom (1992:77). Here I wantto make two comments: first, that it is unclear to me what guarantee could exist in advance to determine which practices of freedom are'suggested' and which are 'imposed' (see Foucault 1988:11 ). For instance, feminists have amply demonstrated the various ways in which women's bodies are disciplined by diet, exercise, and the corset. However, it has been possible for women not only to escape some of the more pernicious effects of femininity, but also to begin to make themselves over in ways which they want; to technologise themselves. The difficulty is that there is no guarantee that these 'liberatory' practices will not be appropriated by 'patriarchal' power. However, there is also no guarantee that they will be. The problem is one of contingency: women are not simply locked into regimes of disciplined femininity. There are interstitial possibilities for refusal, subversion and even productive action. 5 What is crucial in determining the positive and negative dimensions of any action is critique. Second, McNay in extending Habermas' critique of Foucault to the ethical works, appears to be suggesting that a set of pre-defined priorities is a necessary basis for political action. However, as the work of Foucault and Butler has indicated, identities or positions proffered in advance of political action may have the effect of reinforcing existing regulatory frames of reference in addition to proscribing certain forms of identity or action in a normalising fashion. McNay's second and more persuasive point is that self-stylisation is not sufficient to overcome those 'deeply entrenched cultural norms (such as certain unspecified biological phenomena) in which our bodies are embedded'. She notes that 'the concepts of stylization and aesthetics are not appropriate categories with which to tackle the various issues involved' (1992:80). This raises the issue of whether or not self-aestheticisation is an adequate strategy with which to resist the government of individualisation (1992:165). Can it escape relations of power? Can the (putatively) solitary
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nature of ethics translate into' a politics of difference that could initiate deepseated social change'? (1992:177) I want to make a number of observations here: first, McNay writes as if any feminist adoption of Foucault's ideas on ethics would be wholesale, without change. Even supposing Foucault himself neglects the question of social hierarchisation and inequality in the context of self-stylisation, there is no need for such a total adherence to Foucault's ethics as the work of Butler illustrates. Leaving that aside, there is clearly an issue concerning the validity or effectiveness of individual action in the face of social structures of domination. One individual's refusal to conform to gender stereotypes does not of itself fissure the edifice of gender hierarchy. As already noted, there is the potential problem of recuperation (Foucault's idea that power is neither good nor bad but dangerous). In addition, the notion of ethics or stylis tics does not address those issues of political economy that might have a bearing on how an ethics could be performed, and by whom. However, as Butler's work demonstrates, a stylistics is not necessarily the isolated work of the individual. When discussing acts of parody or subversion, Butler has in mind acts that resonate publicly, that impinge upon social consciousness, that involve people learning to read particular practices in different ways. It is in the challenge to conventional ways of understanding the symbolics of certain actions, modes of behaviour and gestures that parody has its political impact (1994:38). Butler is well aware that parody, in itself, is not politically subversive; that certain parodic representations of gender may be potentially recuperable. The difficulty, and this I think is the real crux of McNay's reluctance to endorse Foucault, is that the 'legibility' of gender protest is not predictable in advance. It is this lack of predictability that troubles McNay: for her a workable politics is one which assigns values to different practices so that programmatic action becomes possible. The point for Foucault and Butler is that they both categorically reject the predictive model of politics. It is the indeterminacy of transgressive politics that is at the heart of the debate. Furthermore for Foucault (and for Butler), self-aestheticisation is not, as McNay's argument implies, the sole means of resisting the government of individualisation. Foucault mentions both the centrality of critique, and the active refusal of existing practices alongside his notion of technologies of the self both of which could be collective projects. McNay ignores this and argues as if self-stylisation is presented by Foucault as the only category of political action. This desire for collective action connects with a related criticism of Foucault: 'Although Foucault's idea of an aesthetics of existence is informed by a respect for difference, without showing how a strategy of self-formation relates to a politics of solidarity, it runs the risk of lapsing into an atomized politics of introversion' (1992:157-8, my emphasis). The 'intense subjectivism' of Foucault's work, contends McNay (1992:161), compromises its political effect. Foucault's ethics (and any feminist adoption of them) privileges a privatised relationship of the self to the self over the social self, the self formed through social interaction. Central to her claim is Foucault's apparent rejection in a 1983 interview of a necessary link between ethics and the broader social, political and economic structures of society
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(1984:350). McNay reads this as an indication of Foucault's belief that the formation or aestheticisation of the self is 'predicated on the severance of links between the self and other social structures' (1992:165). In the process McNay transforms Foucault's remark about the contingency of the ethical self-society relation into a universal principle of his ethics. There are two factors of note here: first, the context for Foucault's remark is historical: he suggests that at present our moral code is such that we believe all moral/ immoral actions have implications ('an analytical or necessary link') for society both at the private and public level. An exploration of Greek and Roman ethics, by comparison, indicates that there are other ways of understanding the ethical relationship (such as, an aesthetic relation (1984:350). Furthermore, as he notes elsewhere (1988:11) no individual can stand outside their culture; no one can escape all forms of social conditioning (much in the way that women cannot evade the heterosexual matrix). This implies that all ethics do indeed have a social dimension, albeit differently articulated. What is also significant about McNay's critique of the political ramifications of a feminist turn to the ethics is that for her the only defensible feminist politics seems to be a 'politics of solidarity'. The dynamics of this argument have, to some extent, already been discussed. Feminist notions of solidarity tend to require the delineation of some sort of pre-given identity capable of uniting women in a common struggle against patriarchy. As Butler and Foucault have persuasively shown, such politics of identity operate against a notion of abjection, denial, exclusion. What Foucault and Butler indicate via the ethics are alternative modalities of political activity. My intention in this paper has been to suggest that one possible feminist version of Foucault's ethics can be found in Judith Butler's conception of gender performativity: the continuous subversion of the categories of the heterosexual matrix. In presenting this comparative study my purpose has been two-fold: to allay some of the criticisms targeted at this type of project, and to explore the alternative sorts of political activity made possible by its adoption. 1
It is important to note that Foucault rejects the idea that contemporary subjects
can merely imitate their Greek ancestors ('you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people' 1984, 343). What he distils from this excursus into pagan ethics in the later volumes of The History of Sexuality is evidence of other modes of historical constitution of the self by the self which draw on particular games of truth (1988:10). 2
Although Butler does not systematically develop themes from Foucault's ethics she does explicitly equate her account of gender performativity with the kind of 'stylistics of existence' advocated by Foucault (1990b:139).
3
These imitations do not presume an original; they are parodies of the idea of an original.
4
McNay also talks about the lack of normative criteria in Foucault's work. Since I have dealt with this issue at length elsewhere I will not deal with it here (Lloyd 1993:437-60).
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The fact that certain feature of identity are deeply inscribed or installed may mean they cannot be easily overthrown, but it does not necessarily signify that they cannot be modified or revised.
Bibliography Butler, Judith (1990a). 'Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory and Psychoanalytic Discourse', in Nicholson, L. Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge. __ _, (1990b). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. __ _, (1992). 'Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of "Postmodernism'", in Butler, J. and Scott, J. Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge. __ _, (1993). Bodies That Matter, London: Routledge. Butler Judith and Scott,Joan (1992). Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge. di Stefano, Christine (1990). 'Dilemmas of difference: feminism, modernity, and postmodernism' in Nicholson, L. Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Diamond, Irene and Quinby, Lee (1988). Foucault and Feminism: Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Flax, Jane (1992). 'The End of Innocence' in Butler and Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1979): Discipline and Punish, Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1982). 'The Subject and Power' in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1984). 'What is Enlightenment?', in The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.) Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1988). 'The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom', in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen: The Final Foucault, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Lloyd, Moya (1993). 'The (F)utility of a Feminist Tum to Foucault', Economy and Society, 22, p.4 McNay, Lois (1992). Foucault and Feminism, Cambridge: Polity. Martin, Luther et al. (1988). Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, London: Tavistock. Nicholson, Linda (1990). Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Probyn, Elspeth (1993). Sexing the Self Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Sawicki, Jana (1991). Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body, London: Routledge. Segal, Lynne and Osborne, Peter (1994). 'Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler', Radical Philosophy, 67, Summer.
Feminist History After Foucault
In this paper I want to explore some directions that feminist history1 might
take post-Foucault, and in the light of postmodem thinking. Feminism's encounter with poststructuralism and postmodernism (for example, Barrett and Phillips 1992; Nicholson 1990; Weed 1989), and with Foucault in particular (Hennessy 1990; Alcoff 1988; Diamond and Quinby 1988), is currently the subject of intense debate. With the publication in the mid to late 1980s of work by Joan Scott, Denise Riley and Mary Poovey, feminist historians could no longer avoid a series of difficult and unsettling questions arising out of the trend towards deconstruction, discourse theory and textual analysis: the so-called linguistic tum in historical scholarship. For many of us, trained in social history and women's history, the shift from experientially-grounded accounts of historical reality to discourse theory has produced something like a crisis of faith in our home discipline. More than any other writer associated with poststructuralism, Michel Foucault has provided feminist historians with a legible set of guide maps for this hazardous journey out of structuralist and modernist thinking. Foucault is seen as perhaps the most accessible and relevant representative of a wider critical tradition which has questioned structuralist and essentialistmodesofthinkingabout'man'andsociety.Importantlyforhistorians,his work shows in a series of practical applications how these new approaches to knowledge, power and discourse can change the way that history is thought about. Reference to Foucault's historical works is now almost mandatory for feminists working on the history of sexuality, the body, madness, crime, and sexual difference. A number of feminist historians have, however, expressed serious reservations about some or all aspects of the swing to discourse analysis (Hoff 1993; Jeffreys 1993; Downs 1993). This important debate reminds us of the need to remain critical of new theories and frameworks. For the purposes of this paper, I want to put to one side arguments about the advantages and pitfalls for feminists of adopting a Foucauldian perspective per se (for example, Hekman 1992; McNay 1992; Sawicki 1991). What interests me here isnotwhetherornotfeministhistoriansoughttouseFoucault,butratherhow and with what effects they might apply Foucault to their historical projects. In particular I am concerned with the limits placed on the effectiveness of feminist history as a social critique when Foucault's poststructuralism is welded on to traditional disciplinary assumptions about the know ability of 'the past'. In theory, many feminist historians sympathetic to Foucauldian approaches accept that all knowledge is discursively constituted. In practice, the disciplinary desire to know that which exists outside of discourseparticularly the historical context and the terrain of 'the past' itself- asserts itself over theoretical scepticism (see for example Newton 1990:451).
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As the ongoing debate surrounding the impact of poststructuralism on feminist history suggests (see Scott and Gordon 1990; Scott and Downs 1993; Canning1994),historiansareparticularlyreluctanttofollowpoststructuralist theories to their logical conclusions. Much effort has gone into finding ways of avoiding what is often termed the 'excesses' of 'pure' discourse analysis. There are frequent calls not to abandon the female subject of history- 'real' women- and to retain a materialist analysis of social and politicalformations as a necessary corrective to a focus on discursive construction. Even within feminist Foucauldian history, the past is taken to consist of discourses plus other things that are not discourses- contexts, institutions, social relations, or a general epistemological backdrop. This dual historical vision of a world comprised of both discourse and whatever produces it is not unrelated to an ambivalence in Foucault's own thinking on the positioning of the nondiscursivewithinhistorical analysis. In The Archaeology ofKnowledge, Foucault proposes a historical method centred on the description of the rules and conventions governing the discursive formation of objects, statements and concepts. He makes it clear that, while a history of the referent is possible, his own project is aimed at dispensing with the 'things' anterior to discourse in order to allow the discourse to 'emerge in its own complexity' (1972:47). But, later in the same work, Foucault states that the archaeological description of discourses 'seeks to discover that whole domain of institutions, economic processes, and social relations on which a discursive formation can be articulated'. Because discourse does not have 'the status of pure ideality and total historical independence', archaeology wishes to uncover 'the particular level in which history can give place to definite types of discourse' (1972:164-5). Foucault's statement leaves unexamined the question of how we come to know the history that 'gives place to' various discourses. There are, however, persuasive reasons for feminists to develop a critical perspective on the domain of institutions, economic processes and social relations. Writer Barbara Brooks distinguishes between her own memories and images of a Queensland childhood and 'a historical voice that says something like this- 'Queensland history is characterised by an emphasis on material progress and development, and the lack of an urban industrial base' (Brooks 1989:30-1). The materiality of history- its economic forces, its social institutions, its political structures- represents for many women a different voice, or a'shadow history', inherited from an intellectual tradition and world view not their own (Ermarth 1989:42). That shadow history is itself a product of discourse. The Foucauldian retention of the non-discursive as a separate analytic field runs counter to that strand of postmodern thought that stresses the primacy of language and systems of thought in the production of social or historical reality. One of the principles of ironic social theory says that reality is discussable- but not much more than this (Lemert 1992:23). There may be a historical'reality'- a terrain of the non-discursive, or 'the past'- but that reality and that past cannot be known independently of the meanings given to non-discursive objects. Those meanings depend on their discursive context and thus cannot be fixed or determined in advance. Take, for example, the corset. The physical object exists, and can often be
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seen and touched. We engage with this particular assemblage of cloth, frame and fasteners as a corset - and not as a petticoat or as a hat - because it conforms to certain rules: it covers the female torso between breasts and hips, it is laced tight around the waist, it is worn under and not over a costume, it may be worn for tennis but not for bathing, it is white or pastel, hardly ever bright green. We recognise corsets as corsets because of the meanings they have acquired from pornography, from medicine, from advertising, and from feminism. These different discursive contexts give us different objects: a sexual fetish, a surgical appliance, a fashion garment, an instrument and symbol of women's oppression. To paraphrase Laclau and Mouffe, a corset is only a corset as long as it is integrated within a system of socially constructed rules (1990: 100-1). As long as every non-linguistic act is meaningful, it is also discursive. Thus the non-discursive is knowable as discourse in much the same way as, in psychoanalysis, the unconscious is knowable as dreams. What is at issue is not so much the existence of things, bodies, events, or abstract forces, but rather how we know, how we analyse and interpret, and how we use that analysis of the material phenomena of the past as a grounds for political intervention. The most corporeal of historical events, rape for example, are known, analysed and transformed through the discourses which produce them (Marcus 1992). Thus the critical work of history is necessarily performed on texts, not on whatever may lie beyond them. What does this premise, that language makes the world knowable, mean for the writing of feminist history? It suggests, for one thing, that we need to find ways of dealing with the non-discursive on the same analytical plane as the discursive. Reading even the most consistently discourse-centred history sometimes involves a jarring shift of gears between context and text. Kathleen Canning's account of the ways in which women workers contested discourses of labour, for example, moves without comment from an introductory summary paragraph describing industrial and political developments in Weimar Germany to an analysis of the discursive construction of female bodies (Canning 1994:384-5). Historical context here provides a nondiscursive and explanatory foil to the discourses which are assumed to the primary analytic object. But wars, government policies and union politics, necessarily known to us through texts, are as much discursive constructions as the pregnant, sexualised or maternal body. Which suggests that feminist historians who choose to focus on discourse need to find ways of acknowledging and dealing with the textual character of contexts and subjecting them to informed criticism. We need at least to ask ourselves how and on what intellectual and sociopolitical grounds we select and mobilise certain contexts in the reading of texts. Looked at in this way, the problem of text and context becomes in part a matter of how to theorise the exchange between past and present (LaCapra 1989:203-8; see also Kramer 1989:114-16). Feminist history's difficulties with context suggests that many of the conceptual problems that arise out of the discursive/non-discursive split apply equally to notions of the past itself. In traditional and discourse histories alike, the past is typically treated as a coherent and hitherto existing
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terrain of investigation, knowable separately from the discourses that may be found within it (Hindess and Hirst 1975:308). Foucauldian histories like other histories, refer to 'the nineteenth century', 'the Classical Age', 'the 1950s' or 'the period from 1869 to 1939'. Such formulae are taken to stand for inert, already-existing backdrops to particular epistemic moments. They are rarely treated as discursive constructions in themselves. Foucault refers to, and appears to endorse, Nietzsche's criticism of the kind of history that reduces the 'diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself'. Foucault then appears to leave questions of temporality aside to focus on traditional history'sbeliefineternaltruths,constantsandcontinuities(Foucault1977:1527). Other critiques of history, however, reinforce Nietzsche's observation that history tends to homogenise and totalise time. Hindess and Hirst argue that, no matter how much the past is divided up into different periods, subjects or regions, history is always constituted as a unity, as 'whatever is past' (1975:309). Mark Cousins explains history's unity in terms of the distinct theoretical protocols of upper-case History. These protocols produce the historical as a distinctive form of existence. Ultimately, all historical differences are subordinated to the identity of History itself (Cousins 1987:129). Feminist histories of discourse, too, proceed as if History is a single, discrete and containable terrain. The description of discursive complexity, contradiction and incoherence within that terrain is often very detailed, but those differences are ultimately subsumed beneath a prior difference: that between past and present. Foucault's history, claim Bennington and Young, can say about the relationship between history and the shift from one episteme and the next 'nothing more powerful than "it happened"'. History is organised around a closure, an explicit shutting down of historicity (Bennington and Young 1987). Hindess and Hirst argue from a Marxist perspective, that, because of this shutting down, 'no matter how it is conceived, [history] cannot affect present conditions. Historical events do not exist and can have no material effectivity in the present' (1975:312). Bearing in mind the familiar cry of politicians who do not want to be troubled by their past to 'leave history to the historians', Hindess and Hirst's claim warrants some consideration. Most feminist historians would, of course, argue that a historical analysis of the situation of women, or of constructions of sexual difference, or of specific discursive formations of sexuality, do have important things to say in relation to contemporary feminist politics. However, if we accept that the driving force of feminism is the analysis of the current situation- of sexual inequalities as we experience them in the present moment- then it seems to me that the political impact of feminist histories that effectively quarantine the past from the present will be relatively contained. The political implications of this closure need to be taken seriously. For those individuals and groups who are actively engaged in current political and intellectual debate, from whatever position, feminist analyses of the past may be viewed as interesting, important and worthwhile. Feminists, indeed anyone, may draw strategically on the evidence of history to support their case. History's amicable relationship with all political causes renders suspect its authority to speak in the present. Because
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the object of historical analysis is, by definition, bracketed off from present concerns, history functions as rhetoric, not as critique. Those who do not like feminist versions of history always have the option of saying that it may have been so, but what happened then has no direct bearing on now- it is only history. Any kind of inquiry conducted on the terrain of the past can be disqualified from any truth game. There may be distinct political gains for feminism if feminist history reconsidersitsattachmenttothepast.Suchareconsiderationmay,ofcourse, lead to the disturbing conclusion that without a past there can be no feminist history. Some notion of 'the past' is, after all, axiomatic to 'history' as it is usually practiced. However, it is also possible to rewrite the historical agenda in such a way that historical work does not become marginalised by a postmodern culture in which the past has lost its immunity as a separate and privileged state of existence. We might start by taking a closer look at what Foucault had to say about the relationship between history and thinking. For Foucault, history is 'the unavoidable element in our thought' (Barker 1994:53). His notion of the archive, sketched out in The Archaeology of Knowledge, offers a valuable means of investigating the process by which history is positioned within contemporary thought. Consisting of the systems that establish statements as events, the archive is the law of what can be said. The archive creates patterns out of what would otherwise be an amorphous mass of accumulated statements (1972:129). Statements are not lost in the past, but enter various fields of use according to certain rules of formation and transformation. One of the tasks of historical investigation is to discover how statements are preserved, reactivated, used, forgotten or destroyed (1972:122-3). Foucauldians engaged in what has come to be known as the history of the present have begun to indicate the value of an archaeological method to contemporary feminism. Unlike histories of discourse, the history of the present is a form of historical investigation that permits a thinking of contemporary problems in different ways. It can reveal the unstable and contingent nature of categories often taken as self-evident within feminist history- those of women, men and gender (Tyler and Johnson 1991:5). The history of the present can also open up for reflection contemporary feminism's own commonplaces and habitual actions (see for example Bell1994, and Johnson 1993).2 Archaeological projects nevertheless follow established historical practice in associating the archive with what is past and therefore clearly marked off from current truths. The analytical framework maintains a rigid past/ present dichotomy that is not always evident in linguistic practice. Wittgenstein likened language to an ancient city made up of houses extended and added to in different periods, and of older streets and town squares being constantly joined by new streets and suburbs (Lyotard 1987:40). Where Foucault's archive is time-bound, Wittgenstein's urbanisation metaphor allows us to see current discourses as a fluid amalgam of the old, the new, and every stage in between. In terms of everyday usage, it is of little significance whether a statement belongs to the past or the present or, if it belongs to history, to what period of history. Archival statements are
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fused so neatly with contemporary statements that any sharp distinction between past and present effectively dissolves. Feminists know as well as anybody else that 'we live in a world in which things have been said' (Barker 1994:79). One variety of poststructuralist feminist history might then be conceived of as the archival analysis of what is currently being said about sex, gender, the family and sexuality. History does not lie dormantly behind, it actively constitutes, all the discursive positions on single parent families, homosexual law reform, the relative disadvantages suffered by boys and girls at school, prostitution, or the effects of reproductive technology. The construction of these events as social 'problems' rests on statements produced by medical, religious, sociological or sexological systems of thought that are historical only in the sense that they are subject to a constant process of generation and regeneration. Some historians may worry that a focus on the present smooths out history's complexities and erases its false starts and blind alleys. A Foucauldian eye for discontinuity and for the principles according to which some things are said and not others- the 'law of rarity' (1972:118-20)- should avoid any slide into presentism. Deconstructive methods which expose hidden binary structures and their textual effects provide a practical means by which the history that is silenced within discourses of the present might be subject to analysis. That which is absent in one text- the repressed binary - will be present in another text or texts that precede it. The silenced other then becomes analysable as a statement from the archive, muted but essential to the production and disruption of meaning. An archival historical practice might be adapted to allow for investigations of the symbiosis of past, present and self. The development of forms of historical writing that abandon any attempt to 'say what happened' and instead acknowledge the indissolubility of fact and fiction, past and present, self and history, would be consistent with a postmodern feminist politics. One of feminism's long-standing projects has been to destabilise, not only the discipline of history, but more broadly western Enlightenment forms of knowledge that have positioned the female as inferior or subordinate to the male. Feminist historical practice that makes less safe the demilitarised zone between past and present is in this context a disruptive and explicitly political action. Kate Grenville's historical fantasy Joan Makes History (1988) suggests that histories freed from an objectivist notion of the past can produce startlingly imaginative political knowledges. This kind of historical writing not only makes new moves in the language game of history, it reinvents the rules. Thinking past and present together does not implyjettisoning the practice of historical investigation altogether, although it may provoke a more selfconscious and critical examination of history's uses, taken-for-granted rules of professional practice and theoretical assumptions (Said 1988:10; see also Cousins 1987). With history reformulated as a 'specific discursive regime' (Bennett 1990:50), feminist scholarship can begin to focus on the dynamic relationship between culture and the discursive practice of history. To take some examples from my own work, this might include looking at the function of historical narrative within arguments for and against welfare
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support for single mothers; the effects of incorporating archival footage of unmarried mothers into television documentaries on teenage pregnancy; or the different strategic uses to which Hawthorne's nineteenth century novel The Scarlet Letter has been put in historical and other social scientific accounts of the 'problem' of illegitimacy. These are examples of what I would call a 'history and' approach, as opposed to a 'history of approach. As Philip Barker argues specifically in relation to Foucault's systems of thought, thinking in terms of 'history and' disturbs the passive status granted 'history' in the 'of' formulation. The conjunction'and' gives the two concepts on either side of it equal weighting, so that each can be seen as active, mutually dependent and constitutive of the other (Barker 1994:40). The 'history and' mode can do even more useful work as a metaphor for a wider reconsideration of historical thinking. It suggests that 'history' is as much a discursive construction, and therefore requires as much intellectual scrutiny, as the object with which it is linked. In so doing, 'history and' approaches expose the political nature of historical narratives and their indispensability to processes of cultural formation. This approach might produce, for example, different readings of oral history's significance to feminism. It is now generally accepted that oral history cannot provide a reliable account of a certain event. It might, as in Luisa Passerini's work, tell us something about how female subjects deal with their memories of those events, and suggest the political significance of culturally and gender-specific ways of remembering (Passerini 1992). We can also textually analyse oral history transcripts and autobiographical accounts for the ways in which some notion of history or the past figures within, structures and facilitates the construction of personal narratives. In talking informally about my own project, I have been struck by the ease and frequency with which a variety of speakers refer to 'the past', by the different ways in which that past is imagined, and by the enabling function served by those historical references in the process of them making sense of the here and now. In this instance, the 'history and' mode opens up the relationship between thinking historically and identity formation. Another line of possible development consistent with postmodem ideas lies in investigations of how, and with what effects, the past is represented and rhetorically positioned within cultural texts of gender and sexual differencesuchastheAustralian Women's Weekly(Evans 1993;seealsoHealy 1993; Game 1991; Hamilton 1991). Historical narrative routinely serves a legitimating function in feminist as well as conservative discourse as a secure and objective foundation for political opinion. Historical scholarship has recently provided support for arguments for and against the proposition that the nuclear heterosexual family should be privileged over other, less desirable, arrangements. Historians can also contribute to a more selfcritical feminist discourse by analysing the uses of history in, for example, feminist anthropology and sociology. Other, perhaps more familiar, forms of feminist history writing effectively bypass the non-discursive. Joan Scott's essays on women's history as a field of feminist inquiry, on the contribution of deconstruction to historical analysis, and on the history of women's history as a profession, discuss the
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relationship between feminism and historical practice primarily on discursive terrain (1988a; 1991). These essays use deconstructive techniques to analyse the practice of history rather than retell the past. Scott's blend of discourse theory and historiography suggests at least one way in which feminist history can build on its status as a self-referential and critical discourse; that is, as a discipline that engages critically with the discursive construction of knowledge, including its own (see for example LaCapra 1985). I have tried to suggest here some political and intellectual advantages of working out alternative routes by which 'those who think historically' might extend and exploit feminism's relationship with poststructuralist thought. If poststructuralism requires feminists to 'think even more dangerously than usual' (Hennessy 1990:252-3), for feminist historians that means thinking dangerously about the past. But I believe that feminist history has more to lose than to gain in exempting itself from that strand of contemporary intellectual culture that has irretrievably lost faith in an objectively knowable reality. By relinquishing its professional attachment to a real past and remaking itself as an archaeological but present-centred project, feminist history becomes a quite specific and indispensable tool in the analysis of contemporary sexual cultures. The kind of feminist historical practice that reveals how history works in the present, that discovers the ways in which the archive gives to us what can be said and thought now about sex and gender, promises to make historical work a much more dangerous pursuit.3 1 By 'feminist history' I mean histories which take as their central problematic questions, those to do with sex, gender, women and sexual difference and in which feminist modes of thought, political strategies and research constitute the main epistemological frame of reference. Although I have chosen to focus here on a relatively discrete body of historical literature, my comments apply to most forms of contemporary history writing. 2 My impression is that Foucauldians with a background in literary and cultural studies write histories of the present, while historians usually write histories of discourse. Australian Foucauldians who have adopted a history-of-the-present approach have tended to focus on issues surrounding childhood, education and citizenship. This division of labour suggests that feminist historians have so far been reluctant to adopt wholesale Foucault's archaeological method. 3 My thanks to Barbara Sullivan, Sarah Lloyd, Carolyn Strange, Maureen Perkins, Jill Matthews, Alison Mackinnon, Jonathan Fulcher,Alison Bashford and Christine Owen for helpful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Tony Bennett for comments on an earlier, related paper, which helped me write this one.
References Alcoff, Linda (1988). 'Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: the Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory', Signs, 13(3):405-436. Barker, Philip (1994). Michel Foucault. Subversions of the Subject. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin. Barrett, Michele and Anne Phillips (eds) (1992). Destabilizing Theory. Contemporary Feminist Debates, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bell, Shannon (1994). Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, Bloomington:
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Bennett, Tony (1990). Outside Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Bennington, Geoff and Robert Young (1987). 'Introduction: Posing the Question', in Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (eds), Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Barbara (1989). 'Maps', in Drusilla Modjeska (ed.), Inner Cities. Australian Women's Memory of Place. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin. Canning, Kathleen. (1994). 'Feminist History After the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience', Signs, 19(2):368-404. Cousins, Mark (1987). 'The Practice of Historical Investigation', in Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (eds ), Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diamond, Irene and Lee Quinby (eds). Feminism and Foucault. Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Downs, Laura Lee (1993). 'If 'Woman' is Just an Empty Category, Then Why Am I Afraid toWalk Alone at Night? Identity Politics Meets the Postmodern Subject', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35(2):414-437; and Reply to Joan Scott, pp.444-51. Evans, Kathryn (1993). 'Constructions of the Past in the Australian Women's Weekly in the 1980s', M.A. thesis (Applied History), University of Technology, Sydney. Foucault, Michel (1972 [1969]). The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon Books. __ _, (1973). The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books. __ _, (1977). Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. __ _, (1990 [1976]). The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, London: Penguin. __ _, (1991 [1975]). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Game, Ann (1991). Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology, Buckingham: Open University Press. Gordon, Linda (1990). 'Response to Scott' and 'Review of Joan Wallach Scott's Gender and the Politics of History, Signs, Summer, pp.852-8. Grenville, Kate (1988). Joan Makes History. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Hamilton, Paula (1991). "Stranger Than Fiction': the Daily Mirror 'Historical Feature", in John Rickard and Peter Spearritt (eds), Packaging the Past? Public Histories, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press/ Australian Historical Studies. Healy, Chris (1993). 'Eliza Back in Danger: Historical Events and Cultural Imagination', paper presented to the 'Bring a Plate' Feminist Cultural Studies Conference, Melbourne. Hekman, Susan J. (1992). Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism, Oxford: Blackwell. Hennessy, Rosemary (1990). 'Materialist Feminism and Foucault: The Politics of Appropriation', Rethinking Marxism, 3( 3-4):252-274. Hindess, Barry and Paul Q. Hirst (1975). Pre-capitalist Modes of Production, London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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Hoff, Joan (1993). 'The Pernicious Effects ofPoststructuralism on Women's History', The Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 October. Jeffreys, Sheila (1993). The Lesbian Heresy. A Feminist Perspective on the Lesbian Sexual Revolution, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Johnson, Lesley (1993). The Modern Girl. Girlhood and Growing Up, St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin. Kramer, Lloyd S. (1989). 'Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra', in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History, Berkeley: University of California Press. LaCapra, Dominick (1985). History and Criticism, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. __ _, (1989). Soundings in Critical Theory, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe (1990). 'Post-Marxism Without Apologies', in Ernesto Laclau (ed.), New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London and New York: Verso. Lemert, Charles (1992). 'General Social Theory, Irony, Postmodernism', in Steven Seidman and David G. Wagner (eds), Postmodernism and Social Theory, Cambridge, MA. and Oxford: Blackwell. Lyotard, Jean-Fran~ois (1984 [1979]). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: University of Manchester Press. McNay, Lois (1992). Foucault and Feminism. Power, Gender and the Self, Cambridge: Polity Press. Marcus, Sharon (1992). 'Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: a Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention', in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds),Feminists Theorise the Political, New York and London: Routledge. Newman, Louise M. (1991). 'Critical Theory and the History of Women: What's at Stake in Deconstructing Women's History', Journal of Women's History, 2(3):5868. Newton, Judith (1990). 'Historicisms Old and New: 'Charles Dickens' Meets Marxism, Feminism and West Coast Feminism', Feminist Studies, 16(3):449-470. Nicholson, Linda J. (ed.) (1990). Feminism/Postmodernism, New York and London: Routledge. Passerini, Luisa (1992). 'A Memory for Women's History: Problems of Method and Interpretation', Social Science History, 16(4):669-692. Poovey, Mary (1988). Uneven Developments. The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. __ _, (1990). 'Speaking of the Body: Mid-Victorian Constructions of Female Desire', in Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox-Keller and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Body/Politics. Women and the Discourses of Science, New York and London: Routledge. Riley, Denise (1988). 'Am I That Name?' Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Said, Edward W. (1988). 'Michel Foucault 1926-1984', in Jonathan Arac (ed.), After Foucault. Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Sawicki, Jana (1991). Disciplining Foucault. Feminism, Power and the Body, New York: Routledge.
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Scott, Joan W. (1988a). Gender and the Politics of History, New York: Colombia University Press. ___, (1988b). 'Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism', Feminist Studies, 14(1):33-50. __ _, (1991). 'The Evidence of Experience', Critical Inquiry, 17, Summer, pp.773-797. __ _, (1991). 'New Perspectives on Historical Writing', in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Cambridge: Polity Press. Tyler, Deborah and Lesley Johnson (1991). 'Helpful Histories?', History of Education Review, 20(2):1-8. Weed, Elizabeth (ed.) (1989). Coming to Terms. Feminism, Theory, Politics, New York and London: Routledge.
Poststructuralism, Feminism and the Question of Rape: Rethinking the 1 Desexualisation' Politics of Michel Foucault !l(jjfie Steplien Introduction Feminists have drawn extensively on the poststructuralist argument that subjectivity is constructed through language and is therefore a culturally specific mixture of various subject positions. Specifically, Foucault's idea that sexuality is not a natural quality of the body, but rather the effect of historically specific power relations has provided feminists with a powerful analytical framework by which to explain how women's experience is controlled by culturally determined images of feminine sexuality. Foucault's theory of the body has given feminist thought a way of conceiving of the bodyasaconcretephenomenonwithoutaligningitsmaterialitywithafixed biological essence (McNay 1992:2-11). It is amid this strategic use of Foucault's work that feminists have made significanthiscommentsonrapeandrapelawreform.Foucault'scomments on rape were recorded as part of a series of debates on Criminal Law Reform in France (1977) and fed into feminist discussions of sexuality and power as they affect women in the rape context. Largely, his work on rape was criticised for not paying enough attention to the unequal nature of sexual disciplinary techniques on the body and was considered unable to be utilised for a feminist theory on rape. The aim of my paper is to explore the possibility of maintaining Foucault's 'desexualisation politics' for a feminist discourse on rape. First, I will outline Foucault's position on rape, illustrating how his thoughts on rape are premised on his theoretical arguments relating to sex and sexuality as presented in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1986). Second, using Bell's (1991) analysis, it can be argued that different views on what constitutes 'sex' in rape discourse have led to an impasse in theorising the function of rape in society between Foucault and feminist theorists. I argue that an awareness of this issue can be helpful in directing a more productive collaboration on the problem of rape. Third, I will present a critique of Foucault's position on rape. Specifically, I will argue that Foucault's conceptions of 'sex', 'power', and 'violence' are limited in that they fail to recognise how the nonegalitarian social structure of sexuality between men and women, is crucial to understanding the harm of rape and hence why violence as a discursive solution to rape is problematic. I also argue that the discursively constructed body plays a significant role in defining its own subjectivity, and consequently, has the ability to resist rape and the cultural meanings attached to rape. Fourth, I will compare Foucault's ideas on rape to those of a contemporary deconstruction feminist, Sharon Marcus. My overall contention will be that feminism can utilise Foucault's framework of
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rape analysis for actively fighting against rape, as illustrated in the work of Marcus.
Foucault on Rape In a volume published in 1977 by the Change Collective, titled La folie
encerclee Michel Foucault proposed that rape should be treated as an act of violence, like a punch in the face, rather than a sexual act. Whereas rape has traditionallybeendefinedasasexualactinthatitinvolvesthesexualorgans, is frequently a sexual activity, and often involves the two sexes (male and female), Foucault argues for the 'desexualisation' of rape, whereby only the physical violence of rape should be punishable (Plaza 1981:27). This is a strategic approach he is taking towards rape law. It is not that Foucault thinks there is no sexual element to rape only that he wants to remove the focus on the sexual element. Foucault's position on rape can be seen to be premised on his theory of sex and sexuality as explicated in the History of Sexuality (1986). In this text, Foucault argues that sex is a fictitious object that functions as an instrument of domination. Sex purports to refer to a transcendent entity existing independently of all social practices. However he states: 'the notion of sex made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements [and] biological functions,. .. and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as ... an omnipresent meaning' (Foucault 1986:154). Foucault denies there are any positive characteristics of bodies 'as they really are'. Foucault argues instead that sex is socially constructed for 'sex is [an] element in a deployment of sexuality organised by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality' (Foucault 1986:155. Emphasis added). Sexuality is the technology of the self by which individuals turn themselves into subjects. Sexuality is a discursive formation, it is not a fact or property of the body, nor does it derive from the sex of the body. Both sex and sexuality are deployed for reasons of constraining and manipulating bodies and individuals. In relation to rape, Foucault argues that we should refuse to see the 'sex' of our bodies as anything more or different from other parts of the body, in order to avoid 'the operations of the discourses of the deployment of sexuality' (Bell1991:96). To treat rape as a sexual crime and to separate it out from other crimes against the body 'colludes with the deployment of sexuality' that Foucault talks about (Bell1991:87). Foucault contends, therefore, that rape be 'desexualised' because it has only been 'regarded as a sexual crime due to the operations of power /knowledge which have structured our understanding of the body' (Bell1991:96). For Foucault, a discursive strategic focus on violence is seen as the solution to the problem of seeing rape as sexual. He believes that 'by collapsing the crime of rape into the crime of assault, one avoids power' (Bell1991:90).
Bell's Discussion of Foucault When Foucault wrote on rape in 1977 his work entered into an existing debate between feminists over the nature of rape. Foucault appeared to take the side of those feminist thinkers, such as Brownmiller, who were demanding that rape be considered an act of violence, just as feminist theory seemed to be moving to a position of discussing rape as sexual again, only in terms
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of sex-as-sexuality and not as desire (the work of MacKinnon and Plaza falls into this latter category). An important analysis of the debate between Foucault and feminist theorists who advocate that rape is sexual, has been made by Vicki Bell in her article 'Beyond the "Thorny Question": Feminism, Foucault and the desexualisation of rape' (1991). Bell suggests that the form of the question, 'Is rape about sex or violence?', upon which the debate between these theorists takes place, is unhelpful in fully understanding and appreciating the specificity of the arguments of the various contributors to the debate (Bell1991:83). Bell contends that there are a number of different meanings attached to the central term of the debate- sex. Consequently, the proposition that rape is/is not sexual can convey a number of different perspectives. First, there is the conception of sex as anatomy that is directly utilised by Foucault where sex is equivalent to the genitalia. Foucault contends, however, that this anatomy is inherently unstable because it is discursively constructed by particular power/knowledge regimes. For Foucault, then, rape is not about sex if sex is about the genitals. Second, there is the conception of sex as sexuality. Catherine MacKinnon argues that rape is about sex in that the social construction of sexuality is relevant to the analysis of rape. She suggests that the violation of women has been sexualised in Western culture, and as such, rape needs to be theorised in relation to sex because to fail to do so only 'preserve[s] the myth that sex is an untainted realm of mutual desire' (Bell1991:93). Rape is also sexual for Dumaresq because it is the location at which discourses intersect to construct particular sexual behaviours through rape and rape law. She contends, that what is problematic about these specific sexualities is that they function to construct permissible and impermissible spheres of sexuality for women (Dumaresq 1981:55 I 56). Third, there is the conception of sex as gender. Plaza argues this position by claiming that it is social sexing which underlies rape, because it is about the ways in which masculine people treat feminine people. Rape is sexual because it is about the relations between men and women. Bell concludes that the dualistic structure of the question 'Is rape about sex or violence?' works to conceal these different usages of the term sex (Bell 1991:91). The significance of Bell's analysis for an evaluation of Foucault's theory on rape is twofold. First, being aware that there are different conceptions of sex that are employed in this debate leads to an appreciation of how the impasse between theorists of rape has occurred. Second, from this position of analysis, a space opens up from which change to rape discourse, which incorporates both Foucauldian and feminist conceptions, can occur. ItmaybethatFoucault'stheoriesofpower,discourseandsexualitystillhave utility, but in relation to a different conception of what constitutes the 'sexual' of rape. From this analysis we are able to recognise the problem of rape as a discursive conflict and, thus, develop new discursive ways of understanding it further.
A Critique of Foucault's Position on Rape Following Bell's analysis that it is the manner in which three key terms, sex, violence and power, are theorised in relation to each other that leads to the various positions in the rape debate, I wish to critique Foucault's position on
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these key terms. I aim to move beyond Bell's study, by indicating a manner of theorising these three key terms by which we do not have to abandon Foucault's 'desexualisation politics' as unfeminist. As previously stated, Foucault argues that in order to avoid the deployment of power that constructs sexuality in the rape scenario, rape should be treated as an assault of violence and not as a sexual crime. By violence, Foucault means direct physical force. Thus, Bell argues, like those early feminist theorists who discussed rape as violence in order to avoid the sex-as-desire contraction, Foucault uses violence as a 'category of behaviour' which denies the other person autonomy over their body (Bell1991:97). However, violence cannot be used unproblematically in the sense that Foucault wishes it could - as a discursive solution to the problem of rape. First, there is the question of 'What constitutes violence, or how do you define violence?' Using violence as the basis on which rapists should be punished poses problems of how the violence that is rape should be categorised in relation to other forms of violence, in the same manner that crimes against the person have been traditionally considered according to the terms of physical damage inflicted. I assert that in the context of rape, Foucault 'forgets' his own perception of 'discourse as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice which we impose on them' (Foucault 1981:67), as playing any part in the construction of physical violence. Thus, he forgets that physical violence is discursively constructed. Second, there is the specifically feminist concern that by using the term violence as a discursive solution to the problem of rape, the interrelations between the terms violence and sexuality are hidden (Bell1991:98). I argue that MacKinnon has made a substantive argument that in contemporary Western society 'to the extent that coercion has become integral to male sexuality, rape may even be sexual to the degree that, and because, it is violent' (MacKinnon 1989:173). In this sense then, violence, and the form violence takes is always contextual, and an evaluation of this context, in whatever form, is essential to formulating violence as a 'category of behaviour' which can become the basis for punishment of a particular act- namely rape. Foucault conceptualises power as operating through discourses that shape our understandings of our body and hence ourselves (Bell1991:96). It is this power which 'shapes' that Foucault wishes to escape. However, a powerful critique of this notion of power, comes from feminists who, Bell argues, contend that '[p ]ower is seen to be the model of authority, and the ability to do as one pleases. It is, furthermore, embodied as opposed to formed within discourse' (Bell 1991:97. Emphasis added). In trying to avoid the deployment of sexuality, feminists argue that Foucault is ignoring a specific component of that power, the existence of social differences between the sexes which, they argue, are an element of rape. Thus, feminists such as Plaza, argue that Foucault's 'desexualisation politics' of rape is asking us to accept the status quo of nonegalitarian social and sexual relations as they relate between men and women. In terms of my analysis of Foucault's work on rape, this analysis of power means a number of things. First, it indicates that the notion of power is
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central to both Foucault and feminists who theorise rape, but that they engage the term with a different aim and premised on different theoretical underpinnings. Second, I argue that the strength of feminist analyses of rape, is that they understand that there are different levels at which power operates, and that the level of power operation between men and women is a significant component of rape analysis. Third, I argue that Foucault's principle for 'desexualising' rape is a suitable means by which to fight rape from a feminist perspective, if used in relation to the specific form of power that feminists identify. Foucault has recognised the operation of power at the very general level of the deployment of sexuality and has suggested that this power can be subverted in the instance of rape by denying the significance that social constructions of sex establish in terms of the self. Feminists on the other hand, have fought for the recognition of specific forms of power and deployments of sexuality that relate to rape, but have remained at the point of claiming their reality for women. In constantly affirming the reality of sexual inequality, feminists are placing themselves in a position from which the possibilities for a solution to the problem of rape are limited because they too are affirming the status quo of unequal social and sexual relations. In terms of the third concept, sex, what can be determined from the discussion so far, is that Foucault's conception of sex as anatomy is limited because it is premised on a limited principle of power and the deployment of sexuality. In trying to subvert the power that shapes our understandings of our bodies, Foucault forgets that there are at least two kinds of bodies male and female- and that there is a significant critique to be made in terms of how different kinds of bodies are discursively marked in different ways and how the discursively marked body shapes its own subjectivity. A significant but, I argue, overlooked element ofFoucault's conception of power as it relates to subjectivity, is his premise that 'where there is power, there is resistance' (Foucault 1986:95). Foucault argues that there are a plurality of resistances to power (Foucault 1986:96). Thus, could not the body itself be a site of resistance? Even when Foucault contends that resistance should not be attributed to some unique locus of revolt, it can be argued that the 'body as discourse' can thwart power, because although 'discourse transmits and produces power ... [it] also undermines and exposes it' (Foucault 1986:101). An examination of the conception of resistance to power through the body can be located within the work of two contemporary Australian feminist theorists who analyse the sex/ gender distinction- Elizabeth Grosz and Moira Gatens. The theoretical principles which both Grosz and Gatens apply to their conceptions of the body in terms of the sex/ gender debate, can be used in terms of rethinking Foucault's theory of power and the subversion of the deployment of sex in rape, through a politics of' desexualisation'. Grosz argues, like Foucault, that bodies are moulded, constructed, socially formed and culturally specified. However, Grosz contends that the body should not be seen as a mere writing surface through which 'the body's interiority is produced through its exterior inscription' (Grosz 1987:10). Rather, she argues, we need to consider the ways in which subjects are able
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to act, for the body not only disseminates power, but is a 'potential object of resistance to power' because it is 'capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways' (Grosz 1990:64). Grosz argues that for Foucault's theory of the body to be relevant to feminist theory, feminists have to make clear that there is no neutralised corporeality, but only sexed, specific bodies. Gatens contends further that different kinds of bodies have different social value and significance that, in turn, has a marked effect on the way we perceive and make sense of our bodies (Gatens 1983:148). Gatens does not mean to 'imply any commitment to an essence of the social significance of bodily functions or experiences'. Her point is to indicate that 'the body can and does intervene, to confirm or to deny, various social significances' (1983:149). Gatens argues that the same behaviour has different social significance when acted out by the male subject on one hand and the female subject on the other. Masculine and feminine forms of behaviour are not arbitrary inscriptions on neutral and indifferent bodies. Rather it is biology as lived in particular social contexts that accounts for the cultural construction of sexuality. By drawing attention to the way in which bodies are not passive, neutral objects upon which discourses construct identity, the notion of the unproblematic biological body as the factual base upon which sexuality is ascribed is subverted. Drawing attention to the way in which bodies actively create and recreate themselves, also illustrates that bodies are lived and constituted within a network of bodies; the action of one effects the actions and experiences of others. Thus, a conception of the body as a point of resistance to power and a means of subverting the deployment of sexuality, becomes available to the subject through their very lived existence. This modification on Foucault's conception of power creates a discursive space in which feminists can theorise rape and a means of preventing it, based on Foucault's principle for 'desexualising' rape.
Marcus on Rape - Similarities and Differences with Foucault In her article, 'Fighting bodies, fighting words: A theory and politics of rape
prevention' (1992), Marcus criticises those feminists who posit rape as a fact of women's lives and who oppose the textual, poststructuralist view of rape as insisting on the indeterminacy of rape as an event, on the basis that their theories always posit rape has already having occurred, and as women as either already raped or rapable (Marcus 1992:386). Marcus argues that poststructuralists also discuss rape as something which has already happened, and women as inherently rapable. Both attack the problem in the form of after-the-event strategies, for example rape law reform. Marcus contends that continuing to discuss rape in this manner only contributes to, and reinforces, the view of women as inherently able to be violated. However, Marcus does believe that there is something which can be salvaged from the poststructuralist position, and that is its focus on the textuality of rape. Marcus argues that in order to refuse to recognise rape as the reality of women's lives, rape should be treated as a language (Marcus 1992:388). Understanding rape as a language involves understanding that 'rape is
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enabled by narratives, complexes and institutions which derive their strength ... from their power to structure our lives as imposing cultural scripts' (Marcus 1992:388). Thus, where rape is understood as language, we can account for rape's prevalence and its potential prevention, because the language of any cultural script is open to change. Where does Marcus' work intersect with Foucault's work on rape? How does it differ? First, where Foucault understands 'sex' to mean anatomy in the rape context, Marcus conceives of 'sex' in the sense of both 'gender' and 'sexuality'. Marcus utilises the perspective of sex as gender when she talks about rape as being scripted. In this instance, Marcus is referring to cultural constructions of what constitutes men's and women's behaviour. Sheargues that the rape script determines that men and women follow the social roles set out for them within the cultural dialogue of unequal sexual relations. When discussing rape as scripting, Marcus applies the notion of sex as sexuality. Like Dumaresq, Marcus is concerned with rape as the site of specific constructions of female and male sexuality, that of the active male and the passive female. Second, where Foucault discusses violence as directphysicalforce, Marcus focuses on the notion of violence as discourse and language. In theorising rape as a language, Marcus asserts that there is a discursive representation at work which determines the concept of violence and its manifestation as social practice. There is an' order of language which speaks violence- names certain behaviours and events as violent, but not others, and constructs objects and subjects of violence' (de Lauretis 1987:32). Marcus is also concerned with the ability of language to itself produce violence. Thus, Marcus takes on board Foucault's theory that discourse is violent because it is controlling of subjectivity. However, she applies this theory to the construction of 'physical violence' itself- the type that Foucault considers to be a discursive solution to the problem of rape. Thus, Marcus attempts to subvert the construction of what constitutes violence and who is allowed to be the legitimate object and subject of violence. This would appear to amount to a 'desexualisation of violence', for the construction of violence in rape is a part of the deployment of sexuality. This is something that Foucault does not address in his theory of rape. Third, power for Marcus, as for Foucault, is associated with discourses that surround the body and create sex. In defining rape as a language, Marcus is illustrating the manner in which sexuality is socially constructed through the capacity of language to 'name'. Marcus is quite comfortable with the poststructuralist notion of the inseparability of 'text and world', and illustrates this by arguing that there are means of intervening in the rape script which can subvert the manner in which the language of violence has positioned, and continues to position, women as amenable to the realisation of rape. However, there are two differences between Marcus' understanding of power and Foucault's. First, Marcus is specifically interested in how power and discourse have been used against women. Second, she is also interested in resistance to power, specifically the ability of the body, as a discursive construction, to resist and reshape power relations. It is Marcus' contention
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that women should use their bodies to deny the sex roles that the language of violence, and the rape script, appoints them. Marcus points out that 'the grammar of violence defines rape as an act committed against a subject of fear and not against a subject of violence', thus 'by fighting back, we [women] cease to be grammatically correct feminine subjects and thus become much less legible as rape targets' (Marcus 1992:396). Marcus, subsequently, agrees with Foucault's argument that we should' desexualise' rape, that we should see rape as equal to other crimes against the body. For Marcus, the harm in rape is in the construction of specific sexualities that define women through their bodies. Clearly, however, there are different or more specific forms of sex, power and violence that Marcus wishes to subvert, using Foucault's principle of 'desexualisation'.
How does Marcus utilise Foucault's work for a Feminist theory of Rape Prevention? Marcus' analysis of rape moves beyond the impasse of current feminist thinking, to a position beyond the dualistic structure of the question 'Is rape about sex or violence?'. I argue that Marcus has renegotiated the manner in which the three terms- sex, violence, and power- are theorised in relation to each other in the context of rape, utilising aspects of both Foucault's work onrape,andtheworkoffeministtheoristsonrape.IarguethatwhatMarcus does, is modify or extend Foucault's theoretical principles, and uses them in relation to feminist concerns and objectives. How does this come together in terms of Marcus' theory of rape prevention? In theorising rape as a language, I argue, Marcus clearly accepts Foucault's general theory of power and the ability of discourse to shape subjectivity. Marcus argues that in the instance of rape, the language of violence is scripted according to cultural codes of who is the correct and legitimate object and subject of violence and, in turn, the victim and perpetrator of the rape are ascribed specific roles in society. Marcus contends that the deployment of such a discourse of violence and rape has worked against the interests and protection of women, thus, she wishes to subvert or avoid power as it is enacted in the rape scenario. Marcus desires to manipulate language in order that women may represent themselves in more positive ways. This can still be achieved in the strategy Foucaultsetout-'desexualising' rape. However, I assert that it is the specifically sexed nature of violence that Marcus seeks to redress and which Foucault fails to address in their respective analyses of rape. Thus, Marcus' use of the strategy of 'desexualisation' differs in two ways from the manner in which Foucault intended it be used. First, Marcus applies the politics of desexualisation to the specific unequal relation between the sexes that is reinforced by the construction of specific sexualities in rape, whereas Foucault applies the politics of desexualisation strictly in terms of anatomy and the naming of specific parts of the body as special. Second, Marcus asserts that women should utilise the politics of'desexualisation' themselves, in the very instance of an attempted rape, rather than in the context of after-the-event activities, such as legal recourse. I contend that within this suggestion lies Marcus' modification to
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Foucault's theory of power, and that is the ability of discursively constructed bodies to resist and shape their own subjectivity. Marcus is suggesting that women break the rape script and hence the power of discourse to control subjectivity by assertively using their bodies to subvert the gendering and gendered violence that is rape. By acting in ways that go against their ascribed role in the rape script, women no longer fulfil the characteristics that define a subject of fear. Rape is' desexualised' in this instant, in that one of the key actors in the rape scenario - the victim - resists the particular deployment of sexuality that they consider oppressive. Marcus argues that applying the politics of 'desexualisation' in the rape script as opposed to after, is more useful in preventing rape in that it serves women's immediate interest, and that is to avoid being raped. In Foucault's call to desexualise rape in the context of rape law, the rape has already literally occurred, thus the very act which is to be avoided has already taken place. Finally, the manner in which Marcus advocates women utilise their bodies to subvert the rape script and the deployment of sexuality would appear to be in concert with Foucault's assertion that violence be used as a discursive solution to rape. In a sense this is correct. Marcus advocates that a feminist discourse on rape can be developed when male violence against women is displaced in the rape script, and women's capacity for agency and violence is put in place (Marcus 1992:395). What differs about Marcus' use of violence as physical force, is that she utilises it with the objective of avoiding not only the violence of language but also the language of violence. If women engage in forms of physical violence against their aggressors, they can prevent the harm of rape which is the violence of discourse to shape sexuality. Women's use of physical violence can also redefine what constitutes violence, or at least who are the legitimate perpetrators of violence. Marcus does not use physical violence as a discursive solution in the sense that Foucault envisaged- as an end to the problem, replacing one word 'sex' in the rape text with another word 'violence', - but rather as a means by which discourse that shapes physical violence and sexuality can be reformulated. Marcus uses Foucault's theory of power and discourse and his politics of 'desexualisation' to contradict the deployment of sexuality that takes place in the context of rape and make room for new cultural constructions that acknowledge women's agency. In doing so, Marcus applies Foucault's 'desexualisation politics' to modified notions of'sex', 'violence' and 'power' which recognise the specificity of unequal social and sexual relations between men and women, and the power of individual bodies to resist power and shape their own subjectivity.
Conclusion I have attempted to show that Foucault's politics of 'desexualisation' is not beyond feminist appropriation in relation to rape. Where his notions of sex, violence and power have been illustrated to be insufficient for feminist purposes, modifications have been made that render his thoughts applicable for feminist discourse on rape. A significant critique of Foucault's thoughts on rape indicated three major problems. First, his notion of sex-as-
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anatomy was seen to be limited in thatitfailed to appreciate thenonegalitarian sexual and social relations that exist between men and omen in society, and that therefore make rape sexual. Second, Foucault's notion of violence was found to be problematic in that, like sex, it is a discursively constructed concept. Thus, Foucault failed to appreciate that the violence of rape is fundamentally derived from the asymmetrical construction of sexual relations. Third, Foucault's notion of power left undeveloped the nature of bodies to resist and, thus, the ability of women to fight against, or manipulate, the deployment of sexuality in the rape context. Consequently, from this critique, a pathway through the impasse of rape analyses emerged. Through the work of Sharon Marcus, I illustrated that it was possible to apply Foucault's principle for subverting power, his 'desexualisation politics', to the specific problem of power as it relates to rape, that of the nonegalitarian sexual relations between men and women. Using feminist theory, a conception of the body as a point of resistance to power came into being, and a means of subverting the deployment of sexuality became available to the subject through their very lived existence and in the context of the rape scenario. Using the framework proposed by Bell, a deeper understanding of the various perspectives on the rape debate was achieved. From this analysis, a space opened up from which change to rape discourse, which incorporates both Foucauldian and feminist conceptions, can occur. As previously stated, we are able to recognise the problem of rape as a discursive conflict and, thus, develop new discursive ways of understanding and theorising it further. Significantly, it can be argued that all is not lost for feminism, in Foucault's theory of 'desexualising' rape and a pathway through the impasse of dichotomous thinking can be theorised.
Bibliography Balbus, Isaac D. (1988). 'Disciplining women: Michel Foucault and the power of feminist discourse', in J. Arac (ed.) After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, London: Rutgers University Press, pp.138-160. Bell, Vicki (1991). 'Beyond the "thorny question": Feminism, Foucault and the desexualisation of rape', International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 19, pp.83100. Benhabib, Seyla (1992). Situating the Self Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner (1991). Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, London: Macmillan. Braidotti, Rosi (1986). 'The ethics of sexual difference: The case of Foucault and Irigaray', Australian Feminist Studies, 3, pp.1-13. Cousins, Mark and Athar Hussain. (1984). Michel Foucault, London: Macmillan, Chapters 8 and 9. de Lauretis, Teresa. (1987). 'The violence of rhetoric: Considerations on representation and gender', Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp.31-50. Diamond, Irene and Lee Quinby. (1988). 'American feminism and the language of control', in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern Uni Press, pp.193-206.
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Dumaresq, Delia. (1981 ). 'Rape- Sexuality in the law',M/F: A Feminist Journal, pp.4159. Edwards, Anne. (1989). 'The sex/ gender distinction: Has it outlived its usefulness?'. Australian Feminist Studies, 10, pp.1-12. Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. __ _, (1980). Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed.) Brighton: The Harvester Press. __ _, (1981). 'The order of discourse',in Robert Young (ed.) Untying the Text: A Post Structuralist Reader, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp.48-78. __ _, (1986a). The History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction, (translated from the French by Robert Hurley) New York: Vintage Books. __ _, (1986b). The Use of Pleasure. Volume Two of the History of Sexuality, (translated from the French by Robert Hurley). New York: Vintage Books. __ _, (1988). 'Technologies of the self', in Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton (eds) Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp.16-49. Fraser, Nancy (1989). Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.SS-66. Gatens, Moira (1983). 'A critique of the sex/ gender distinction', in Judith Allen and Paul Patton (eds) Beyond Marxism? Interventions After Marx, NSW: Intervention Publication Collective, pp.143-160 Gatens,Moira (1989). 'Womanandherdouble(s): Sex, gender and ethics',Australian Feminist Studies, 10, pp.33-48. __ _,Moira (1992). 'Power, bodies and difference', in Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds) Destabilising Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.120-137. Grosz, Elizabeth (1987). 'Notes towards a corporeal feminism', Australian Feminist Studies,5, pp.1-16. __ _, (1990). 'Inscriptions and body-maps: Representations and the corporeal', in Terry Threadgold and Anne Cranny Francis (eds) Feminine, Masculine and Representation, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, pp.62-74. Kirby, Vicki (1991). 'Corpus delicti: The body at the scene of writing', in Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell (eds) Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, NSW: Allen and Unwin, pp.88-100. MacKinnon, C. (1989). Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Marcus, Sharon. (1992). 'Fighting bodies, fighting words: A theory and politics of rape prevention', in Judith Butler and Joan W Scott (eds) Feminists Theorise the Political, New York: Routledge, pp 385-403. McNay, Lois (1992). Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self, Cambridge: Polity Press. Outram, Dorinda (1989). The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press. Patton, Paul (1994). 'Foucault's subject of power', Political Theory Newsletter,6, pp.6071.
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Plaza, Monique (1980). 'Our costs and their benefits', M/F: A Feminist Journal, 4, pp.28-39. Plaza, Monique (1981). 'Our damages and their compensation. Rape: The will not to know of Michel Foucault', Feminist Issues, Summer, pp.25-35. Ryan, Alan (1993). 'Foucault's life and hard times- Book Review', The New York Review, AprilS, pp.12-17. Sawicki, Jana (1988a ). 'Identity politics and sexual freedom: Foucault and feminism', in Diamond and Quinby (eds). Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press, pp.177-191. Sawicki, Jana (1988b ). 'Feminism and the power of Foucauldian discourse', in J. Arac (ed.) After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, London: Rutgers University Press, pp.161-78. Sawicki, Jana (1991). 'Foucault and feminism: Toward a politics of difference', in Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (eds) Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.217-31. Stem, Lesley (1980). 'Introduction to Plaza', M/F: A Feminist Journal, 4, pp.21-7. Tong, Rosemarie (1992). Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction, London: Routledge. Turkel, Gerald (1990). 'Michel Foucault: Law, power and knowledge', Journal of Law and Society, 17, pp.170-193. Woodhull, Winifred (1988). 'Sexuality, power, and the question of rape', in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds). Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press, pp.167-76.
Brand News: Using Foucault to Theorise Rape, the Media and Feminist Strategies Cliris .91.tmore Introduction This paper is part of a broader project on the stories that are told about sexual violences, particularly in relation to public controversies; and on how these stories are articulated in 'grass roots' politics, the media and popular culture, academic theory and research, and all of their overlaps.l I am especially concerned with what interests might be at stake in the various contests for meaning that go on, and with the always interested stories that we tell in turn about these investments (Atmore 1993b 1994b, 1995). My focus is also on the potential in trying to explain and oppose sexual violences using some kind of critical combination of radical feminist and post-structuralist theories (Atmore 1992a, 1994a, 1995). Foucault did not have much to say directly concerning sexual violences as part of technologies of sex, let alone, as feminist critics like Teresa de Lauretis (1987) and Judith Butler (1990) have emphasised, as aspects of technologies of gender. ButasmuchofFoucault'sworksuggests,silencesarealsopartofthepower/ knowledge complex, and his own texts can be utilised against their more phallogocentric aspects. 2 Part of my larger project is therefore concerned with the productive possibilities as well as the tensions and impasses of drawing on the conceptual approaches of a masculinist thinker who was at the same time definitely not, to use Meaghan Morris' (1988) phrase, a 'ladies man'. There are a number of major Foucauldian concepts which seem extremely pertinent to a feminist analysis of rape, as well as highly problematic. For instance, Foucault's argument that a desexualisation strategy be applied to rape and the law (see for example Plaza 1980). The kind of radical feminist view of rape I support both agrees and disagrees with the logic of the desexualisation strategy. On the one hand I think that radical feminists like Catharine MacKinnon (1982, 1983, 1989:171-83) are in agreementwithFoucault (1980a) that prohibition also functions as incitement. Similarly criminologists like Carol Smart (1989, 1990) take seriously Foucault's critique of the confessional as playing into dominant relations of power. But where feminists part company with Foucault is in viewing all of this as much more of a double bind than he seems to; mainly because we see women's relationship to power as also a kind of double bind, and we therefore want a theory of power as both decentred and still in important ways 'king'-based (where 'the king' symbolises far-reaching masculine and Enlightenment-legitimated authority - or to put it more succinctly, phallogocentrism). So if sex is endlessly spoken, it is equally true that in feminist terms, not all has been said. 3
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I want to focus mainly on how cases of sexual violence, specifically rape, are represented through the media. So I'll start by giving an outline of the broader framework we might use, and then I'll move on to a rather unusual case in New Zealand, which I think is relevant in all sorts of ways to Foucault's work.
Rape as brand news In Power/Knowledge, Foucault (1980e:131-2) describes the media as one of 'a
few great political and economic apparatuses' which tend to control the production and transmission of 'truth'. Media representations of rape cases can therefore be thought of as products and strategies of technologies of both sex and gender, summed up in my phrase 'brand news'. This phrase has several interpretations. Rape news can first be thought of as news about various processes of branding. Rape is a particularly oppressive practice in which gender is (re-)marked on the body, as part of a broader system of social processes in which 'being' a woman or a man is, rather, continuously performed (MacKinnon 1989:171-83; Butler 1990). Here aspects of Foucauldian and radical feminist approaches can be usefully combined. Judith Butler (1990) argues that what radical feminists call'compulsory heterosexuality' (eg. Rich 1980) can also be thought of as' a complex strategical situation' resulting from the continuous play of the entangled technologies of sex and gender; or in other words, heterosexuality operates as a regime of truth. 4 The epistemic regime of heterosexuality produces and draws on a discursive network which Butler calls 'the heterosexual matrix'. The heterosexual matrix is phallogocentric, naturalising oppositional and hierarchical constructions of sex, gender and desire. Rape exemplifies the workings of the heterosexual regime. If power is exercised through discourses, which constitute truth, Foucault also reminds us that 'nothing is more material, physical, corporal than the exercise of power' (Foucault 1980b:57-8). And as Teresa de Lauretis (1987:31-50) argues about rape, rhetoric and violence are imbricated in one another. Rape is a material practice in which the mutually exclusive and exhaustive twogender system of the heterosexual matrix is made into dominant reality (1987; Jay 1981; Wittig 1982, 1985; Plaza 1980); rape is 'the violent enforcement of a category violently constructed' (Butler 1990: 166), not only scripted, but scripting (Marcus 1992:391). Sorapein the media is 'brand news' directly because it is about rape itself as a socio-political process of branding- 'social sexing' in Plaza's words, or 'the disciplining of docile bodies' in Foucault's. But 'brand news' is also news about branding in other ways. Most media reports of rape are concerned with court cases, or at least their possibility via rape complaints made to the police (Soothill et al. 1990). The struggle between accuser and accused in court in rape cases is often a classic illustration, according to radical feminist analyses, of conflicting realities (MacKinnon 1983, 1989:171-83), and a demonstration of Foucault's (1980e) argument about the radical contingency of truth claims. Whose truth wins and becomes reality is the outcome of a battle among differentially weighted discourses, generally in the rapist's favour. These contests are adjudicated via legal, medical and psychological searches for 'telling' marks on and in
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the bodies of accuser and accused (eg. '[T]he girl...bore signs of a sexual attack' ['Police Investigate Alleged Rape', The Dominion, 9 May 1991:3]; Smart 1990). According to the presence or absence of these signs, alleged rapist and victim are further branded; classified, disciplined and normalised as cases for appropriate treatment (cf. Foucault 1977). Secondly then, there is branding in news itself. The press may also produce its own judgements about rape cases, whether or not a court case is resolved (eg. Soothill and Walby 1991 ). A rapist may be branded as guilty before a trial has taken place, or a woman branded a liar despite an official guilty verdict. The branding by and in news can also be categorised in a third sense: 'brand news' as formulaic, as a genre of rape reporting. Media rape stories are shaped by the heterosexual matrix. This is partly because of the close relationship between rape news and court proceedings, rape law being notoriouslyphallogocentric (see for example MacKinnon 1982,1983,1989:17183; Smart 1989:26-49, 1990). So rape stories tend to reproduce mutually exclusive and hierarchical conceptual categories according to which 'real rape' is defined as aberrant rather than normal, rare rather than typical, and violence rather than sex. This disqualifies women's more complex experiences (Atmore 1994a, 1995). The media also engage in further strategies in their own right. For example, the tendency has actually increased recently for the press to represent rapists as 'sex beasts' or monsters (Soothill and Walby 1991). As part of this 'real rape' narrative, innocence of the woman must be shown to have been violated. But as Foucauldians and radical feminists would again agree, the problem for women is that the legal trial tends to become a spectacle which requires the 'victim' to confess sex, and this initselfbecomes a source and site of sexual pleasure, thereby disqualifying or at least trivialising aclaimofrape (MacKinnon 1989:171-83;Smart 1990; cf. Foucault 1980a). The media is directly implicated in this confessional: newspaper reports of rape have a long tradition as a source of soft pornography (Soothill and Walby 1991), and more recently United States television trial coverage has involved detailed reporting of sexual assault charges and evidence. 5 The media's rules for rape news therefore somewhat paradoxically help to reproduce what Carol Smart (1990:206) describes as 'the same story... like the Original Story being re-enacted on a daily basis'. The success of a formula is that it is both unique and repeatable: not brand new but 'brand news'. These interpretations of 'brand news' show up the double bind for raped women. A woman who alleges rape must subject herself to further branding through supplying proof of having been branded. Branding as criminal evidence, as media reporting according to the formulaic logic of 'brand news', and as rape itself, are powerfully shaped by the heterosexual matrix. If the branding in rape is sexual for the rapist, it is also sexual in the entertainment elements of rape stories. The hierarchically ordered binary oppositions of phallogocentrism in law and media are produced by and in turn reproduce the sexual hierarchy of man/woman central to the process of rape itself; or to use Butler's language, the heterosexual matrix and the regime of heterosexuality are mutually constitutive. While there is much more that could be said at this more general level, it is also helpful to take
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another leaf or two from Foucault's book(s) and use the odd or 'abnormal' to highlight practices at work in the more usual and everyday. So I want now to consider a media-ted controversy over rape with an unusual twist, in the light of these various dynamics of 'brand news'.
The case of Mervyn Thompson In 1984 in Auckland, New Zealand, a university lecturer and playwright
named Mervyn Thompson was chained to a tree by a group of women. The word 'rapist' was spraypainted on his car, and posters around Auckland University also denounced him for rape. The group of women was never identified, and no legal charges were laid. Whether Thompson was guilty and deserving of the attack was hotly debated in university and theatre circles, and became a broader cultural controversy via the media. Two main stories vied with each other in a battle for 'the truth', not just about Thompson, but about rape and sexual politics. In the first, basically radical feminist version, which gave at least some support to the attack, Thompson used his university position to sexually harass women students, including committing several rapes. A group of women decided action was necessary. Lacking confidence in the official channels' likely response, they instead chose direct action, and subsequently alerted the media. The second version was the dominant media stance, and took a mainly liberal, 'proThompson' perspective. From this view, Thompson was an active supporter of feminist and other 'progressive' causes. Hence he was not a rapist, but was scapegoated by radical and lesbian feminists who believe all heterosexuality to be rape. The Thompson controversy is a particularly rich source of material(Atmore1992b, 1993a, 1994a, 1995);Icanonlypointtoafewthemes here.
The attack on Thompson as feminist news-making Commentators generally agree that those who seek to oppose the primary interpretive framework of the media are still forced to debate within its terms (Atmore 1994a). Thompson's position, according to many feminists, was that of a white, professional man who had raped a woman known to him, probably without the use of overt force. In an officially reported statistical sense, such a rape (and rapist) is rare. Hence to assert Thompson's normality as rapist and the typicality of this kind of rape, the feminists who attacked him had to produce his situation as newsworthy for media which tend to only select as 'brand news' the statistically 'typical' real rape storythat is, rape and rapist as aberrant. So the group opted for a sensational 'angle', and a violence which would be news because it was both illegitimate and carried out by women. The style of the attack also fulfilled the demand of news, like that of the legal system, for tangible evidence of branding. The women left public signs via the chaining of Thompson, the spraypainting of 'rapist' and the tip-off to the media. These strategies were successful to some extent; for example, photographs of feminist anti-rape graffiti were presented as visual proof of the women's crime in several media stories (Thompson 1984a; Wall 1984; Women Against Sexual Harassment 1984). Some accounts actually described the action against Thompson as 'branding' him a rapist (eg. Reid
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1984). Foucault's descriptions of criminal branding are also relevant: Thompson, chained to a tree, was set up as 'the herald of his own condemnation ... in him, on him, the sentence had to be legible for all' (Foucault 1977:43)."
Thompson's media trial The action was a good story in media terms, being, like a rape case, both news and spectacle. As I have suggested, rape stories require confession of the details of an ordeal. Thompson filled the slot left vacant by the lack of a victim coming forward to make direct allegations against him. So the attack received a considerable amount of detailed publicity which was sympathetic to Thompson as victim, encapsulated by headlines like 'The Man Branded "Rapist" Speaks Out'.7 Thompson's role in the media coverage suggests a strong parallel to his stage career in which he frequently performed one-man shows from his own scripts. Despite the potent newsworthiness of personal testimony, it is rare for the mainstream media to allow the chief protagonist in a topical news case to simply narrate his or her own story. This sympathetic coverage was shaped by Thompson's position as a male victim of violence. The media response to his testimony contrasts with the situation for women, whose experiences, even when not represented as 'alleged', are frequently constructed as 'not serious', and as I have outlined, reduced to 'sex'. Social science studies (eg. Russell1984) therefore show that women's response to rape is generally not that of Thompson, whose 'instinct, right from the start, was to tell my story'.s But accounts sympathetic to Thompson also drew on fragments of the radical feminist critique of rape, to produce their own reverse discourse (Foucault 1980a:101-2). In these stories it was the women who attacked Thompson and the feminists who supported it who were like rapists. For example, A.K. Grant's (1984) satirical column in The Listener argued: Talking of rape, why have the women who assaulted Mr Thompson not been caught and put on trial? That, after all, is what happens to ... Similarly, an editorial in the Evening Post newspaper was titled 'Vigilantes Rape Natural Justice' (13 April1984).
Thompson also explicitly compared himself to a rape victim: My present symptoms are those of one who has been raped. My perception of the outside world has changed utterly. From being a person who smiled at dogs, small children and adults in the street, I have found myself exploring every face with suspicion, sweating with fear if I am left alone at night, and quite frankly frightened whenever a member of the opposite sex comes within sight. Only the support of colleagues, former students and those closest to me has pulled me through (Thompson 1984a:23).
So Thompson could not be a perpetrator because he was a fellow sufferer. To invert the theme of the Jodie Foster film, it was 'the accused' who was raped. Thompson also compared himself to the female rape survivor in court, claiming that he had been prevented from telling his own story. Yet in contrast to her experience, Thompson spoke verbosely of his own silencing
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(cf. Foucault 1980a:8). As one reviewer said in response to Thompson's oneman retrospective of his life in the theatre, which included a dramatisation of the attack, 'playing yourself as an innocent crucified victim is difficult to bring off' (Riley 1991). Nevertheless, Thompson largely achieved this. His death from cancer in 1992 has even been represented in reviews of his life and work as a kind of murder by feminists. 9
Thorn pson' s attackers Accounts of the attack had other elements of the classic media rape story. It was not only Thompson who was branded, but also the group who attacked him. Thompson claimed to have been abducted at night, by strangers. As in 'serious rape' accounts, the assailants were represented as monstrous: they were described as 'all claws and fangs' and their actions as 'brutish' (Thompson 1984a:21). Feminists 'turned on [Thompson] like a pack of blood-thirsty wolves' (Riley 1991:55). The vigilantes 'had bit and run ... Blood lust was running hot' (Wall1984:98). This 'sex beast' branding was assisted by the portrayal of the women as lesbian feminists. Thompson claimed that although none of his attackers were known to him and he had not seen any of them clearly, he knew at least some of them were lesbians by how they looked, and by the voice of one of them on the telephone (eg. Thompson 1984b). In other words, they were identifiable by the marked body of the invert. This was a theme brought out more explicitly in subsequent references to the case; in particular in an investigative journalism article by Carroll Wall (1984), which claimed to give the background to the attack via an exploration of lesbian feminist culture in New Zealand. In this fieldwork narrative, the fearless investigator boldly goes where few have dared, and records her impressions of 'them and their kind' (Wall1984:98) in some detail for the enlightenment of the uninformed audience (Atmore 1992b, 1993a). Wall's voyage and subsequent observation and classification of the alien species evokes the function of Foucault's geographer, who combines in the form of an inventory or catalogue, 'the triple register of inquiry, measure and examination',lO For instance: There are lesbians of all sorts, the kind who wear men's trousers and hats, the threatening, glowering variety in their studded leather and boots, the dressedup dykes with their punk hair and black lips and amazing clothes and those who wear what I've begun to realise is the political dykes uniform of baggy trousers and sweatshirts. (Wall1984:107)
Some implications The women's action can be thought of as an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.1 1 For example, the tactics used challenged law's privileged claim to truth and fed into ongoing controversy about vigilante justice.12 This is an especially charged issue for women: while 'everything is dangerous', at least the more standard 'victim' discourse was contested in the Thompson case (cf. Smart 1990), and the attackers were represented as folk heroes in some unlikely quarters.13 But the case also shows how discourses on all sides, by virtue of their mercenary and unstable qualities, can be annexed to what they set out to
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oppose. As I have pointed out, both the feminist attack and the resulting media stories were shaped by the demands of brand news. However, at the same time Thompson and his supporters found strategic utility in a radical feminist account of rape victims. In reaction, feminists galled by this ended up tying themselves in knots trying to argue that Thompson was not really hurt, thereby buying into phallogocentric definitions of violence and injury which they otherwise opposed (Atmore 1992a, 1995). I do think though that the tables were turned in a way which disrupted taken-for-granted assumptions far more effectively than having a woman try to speak out. The sources of fear in the case were the unknown women 'at large', and consequently the possibility of it happening again. Not notably radical academics quietly observed that the controversy had 'shaken up things around here'; male staff complained that they were now forced to meet with female students with their office doors open, and there was the more explicit paranoia of Wall's article. Although the women's anonymity also rebounded on lesbian feminists, it was Thompson who became the main object ofknowledge. 14 There is some truth to his claim that like other victims he was put on trial; he was certainly far more subject to scrutiny than if an official charge had been laid. For example, his interview on television provoked various speculations about whether he looked guilty or not, and that he protested too much. So Thompson's victimhood shows up how gender matters, but that it is also a social, ongoing, and to some extent unpredictable performance. These tensions must return us to Foucault's desexualisation strategy and the ambivalent feminist response of my introduction. It is helpful here to consider local context in trying to come up with any conclusions about how certain ideas and practices might play (or not) straight into a regime of power /knowledge. The controversy became a turning point for increased discussion about sexual harassment in New Zealand universities, in an era when official complaints procedures did not yet exist. It is also significant that the Thompson case is now indexed in academic referencing systems under the heading of' sexual harassment'. From a 'pure' Foucauldian stance, whatever that is, this sounds like anathema. But if we take the perspective that we cannot discuss sexuality without considering the interconnections to technologies of gender in rape, it could be argued that the attack and the account of sexual violence informing it embodied, at least in part, a kind of desexualisation strategy similar to those gay and feminist practices selectively endorsed by Foucault (Cohen 1988; Foucault 1989). Certainly as I have suggested, the attack and its aftermath denaturalised at least some of the binary oppositions of the heterosexual matrix.15 ProThompson media stories which resisted this did so via conspicuous silences and contradictions about both the case and rape more generally, making them vulnerable to a radical feminist-informed deconstructive critique (Atmore 1992a, 1995). Hence as Foucault's later work on the self emphasises more,1 6 if subversion must always take place from within, that does not mean that everything is simply recuperated and that no change is possible or positive. Foucault (1984:41) describes an ethics of the self as an exercise in
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which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it. Echoing my earlier outline of the productive combination of Foucauldian approaches with radical feminism in analysing rape as a phallogocentric practice, here Foucault's critical and political strategies appear in a more potentially 'take-home' form for feminism. Hence for example, Teresa de Lauretis' (1987:26) notion of 'space-off', which describes a movement from the space represented by /in a representation, by /in a discourse, by /in a sex-gender system, to the space not represented yet implied (unseen) in them. The 'space-off' metaphor seems appropriate to represent both aspects of the Thompson case, and more broadly a feminist version of the desexualisation strategy. 17 De Lauretis' postmodernist feminist position therefore also involves its own meta theoretical shuttling between Foucault's 'official' texts and theradicalfeminism of theorists like Catharine MacKinnon and Adrienne Rich. 18 And as Foucault put it, '[A]s soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult and quite possible'. 19 1
I use 'sexual violences' as a shorthand for a range of diverse practices of sexual coercion; notably for my project: rape, sexual harassment, and child sexual abuse.
2
As an illustration, following Monique Plaza's (1980) call for Foucault to specify his own enunciative modality, we are offered by some contemporary feminist critics (eg. de Lauretis 1984:94, 1987:49(3); Butler 1990:96-7) a somewhat different reading of aspects of The History of Sexuality Volume One. For instance, Foucault gives the example of a simple-minded farmhand who in 1867 was arrested and medicalised for obtaining 'a few caresses from a little girl' (Foucault 1980a:31), and goes on: 'What is significant about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration... So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating' (1980a:32). Despite his own critique elsewhere, Foucault here produces a reverse theme ofinnocence corrupted, in which he sympathises with 'this village halfwit who would give a few pennies to the little girls for favors the older ones refused him' (1980a:32). If context is profoundlyinfluential, Foucault's comments must resonate differently in the present Western social climate where it is not uncommon for both conservatives and the 'falsely accused' to lament the end of an 'innocent' era when adult men could supposedly relate to children without the cultural loadings foisted on them by radical feminist analyses of sexual coercion.
3
See for example Plaza (1980); Bland (1981); Martin (1982); Butler (1987, 1990); de Lauretis (1987); Diamond and Quinby (1988); Woodhull (1988); Singer (1989); Smart (1990); Bell (1991); Sawicki (1991); McNay (1992).
4
Compare for example Butler's description of sex as 'both discursive and perceptual, [which] denotes an historically contingent epistemic regime, a language that forms perception by forcibly shaping the interrelationships through which physical bodies are perceived' (Butler 1990:114, Butler's emphasis), with
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MacKinnon's argument that male power 'extends beneath the representation of reality to its construction' and so confirms 'its way of being and its vision of truth, as it creates the social reality that supports both' (MacKinnon 1989:122). In MacKinnon's radical feminism, male power is' a myth that makes itself true', and '[o]nce incarnated, male superiority tends to be reaffirmed and reinforced in what can be seen as well as in what can be done. So male power both is and is not illusory. As it justifies itself, namely as natural, universal, unchangeable, given, and morally correct, it is illusory; but the fact that it is powerful is no illusion. Power is a social relation ... Living each day reconvinces everyone, women and men alike, of male hegemony, which is hardly a myth, and of women's innate inferiority and men's innate superiority, a myth that each day's reliving makes difficult to distinguish meaningfully from reality... Viewed as object reality, the more inequality is pervasive, the more it is simply 'there'. And the more real it looks, the more it looks like the truth' MacKinnon (1989:99-101). See also MacKinnon (1982, 1983), and Monique Wittig's (1989:245) conception of heterosexuality: 'we are dealing with an object both imaginary and real'. 5
Significantly, a New Zealand newspaper item about this trend was not featured under the court news, but rather in the entertainment section ('Nonstop TV Court Coverage Begins', The Dominion, 4 July 1991:22).
6
Yet the attack in other ways had elements of a more modern era of crime and punishment: '[p]osters, placards, signs, symbols must be distributed, so that everyone may learn their significations' (Foucault 1977:111).
7 Table of contents heading for Thompson (1984a). 8
Thompson, interviewed by Genevieve Westcott on Eyewitness News, Television New Zealand, 12 April1984, quoted in WASH (1984:23).
9
See for example, Comer (1991); 'Playwright Loses Fight with Cancer' (1992). In line with Foucault's argument (Foucault 1980£), resonances between the case and various fictional accounts have also kept the controversy circulating (Atmore 1992b).
10 Interviewers in Foucault (1980c:75). The geographer 'collects information in an inventory which in its raw state does not have much interest and is not in fact usable except by power. What power needs is not science but a mass of information which its strategic position can enable it to exploit'. Foucault responds by citing an anecdote about travellers' tales in seventeenth century France as forrns of coded reports (ibid). 11 See for example Foucault's (1980d:81-5) advocacy of the use of subjugated knowledges as a basis for 'a multiplicity of genealogical researches, a painstaking rediscovery of struggles together with the rude memory of their conflicts' (1980d:83). 12 See Atmore (1992a). The complexities of considering the case within a context of genealogies of popular justice and Foucault's own stance(s) are another paper in themselves. For instance,how is one to classify the attack in the light of Foucault's argument for viewing each resistance as a special case, and hence for taking into account 'resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, which brook no reconciliation' (Foucault 1980a quoted in Plaza 1980:37)? If the case is conceptualised as branding in the senseofpunishment,howrnightitsitwithFoucault'sworkonpenality?Thecase seems to have elements of more than one era of punishment (see note 6), and this might have a lot to do with the phallocentric focus of Foucault's analysis and hence a difficulty with fitting official and unofficial responses to rape solely within this framework.
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13 If rape can be read as bodily inscription, it could be argued that the attack was a form of women's writing (d. Singer 1989 esp. 145-7). More generally, the attackers and feminists who supported the action 'fought dirty', including urging censorship of Thompson's plays, and frequently depicting or responding to the controversy with the subversive force oflaughter (d. Singer 1989:152-4). In contrast, the moral outrage 'traditionally' reserved for feminist response to sexual violence issues was largely confined to liberal, pro-Thompson accounts. 14 Despite the attempts of journalists like Wall, even getting a feminist 'representative' to comment posed challenges. 15 It could be argued that Thompson was produced as a kind of Herculine Barbin figure. This would seem to follow Butler's (1987:138) suggestion that Foucault's strategy of proliferation is to diffuse binary relations with 'the force of internal ambiguity', so that 'oppressors themselves are oppressed, and the oppressed develop alternative forms of power'. 16 See Foucault (1988), Sawicki (1991); McNay (1992:45-7, 194-5); Probyn (1993). 17 De Lauretis (1987:26) describes the subject of feminism as characterised by a movement between the (represented) discursive space of the positions made available by hegemonic discourses and the space-off, the elsewhere, of those discourses: those other spaces both discursive and social that exist, since feminist practices have (re)constructed them, in the margins (or 'between the lines,' or 'against the grain') of hegemonic discourses and in the interstices of institutions, in counter-practices and new forms of community... The movement between [these two kinds of spaces] ... is the tension of contradiction, multiplicity, and heteronomy ... to inhabit both kinds of spaces at once is to live the contradiction which ... is the condition of feminism here and now: the tension of a twofold pull in contrary directions- the critical negativity of its theory, and the affirmative positivity of its politics- is both the historical condition of existence of feminism and its theoretical condition of possibility. 18 For further argument about this overlap as productive, see Atmore (1992a, 1994a, 1995). In The Final Foucault (1988) there is also a tantalising hint, or at least a potentially productive incongruity, for reading the Thompson case. Foucault makes specific reference to teacher-student relations as potentially problematic, needing to be posed in terms of rules of law, political struggle and ethics of the self, directly after he has argued, using the example of sexual relationships, that in contrast to states of domination, power over another is not evil if it can be reversed(Foucault1988:18-19).Howmightwereadthesetwotopicsagainsteach other and feminist critiques? 19 From Michel Foucault Politics, Philosophy and Culture- Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), quoted in Sawicki (1991:123-4).
References Atmore, Chris (1992a). Other halves: Lesbian-feminist post-structuralist readings of some recent New Zealand print media representations of lesbians. PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington. __ _,(1992b).'Strangeobliquewaysofgettingat"reality"?' Afeministdeconstructive reading ofthe truth/ fiction divide in cultural representations of a New Zealand controversy. Paper presented at Australian Women's Studies Conference, University of Sydney, 11 October. __ _, (1993a). "'Branded": Lesbian representation and a New Zealand cultural controversy', in Cultural studies: Pluralism and theory, David Bennett (ed.) pp.281-292. University of Melbourne: Department of English.
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__ _, (1993b ). 'Dirty laundry: Cultural positions in some contemporary constructions of child sexual abuse'. Paper presented at Cultural Studies Association of Australia Third Annual Conference, Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne, 6 December. __ _, (1994a). 'Brand news: Rape and the mass media'. Media Information Australia 72:20-31. __ _, (1994b ). 'Witch hunts, icebergs and the light of reason: Constructions of child sexual abuse in recent cultural controversies', in Helen Borland (ed.) Communi-
cation and Identity: Local, Regional, Global: Selected Papers from the 1993 National Conference of the Australian Communication Association, pp.85-96. Canberra ACT, Australian and New Zealand Communication Association. __ _, (1995). 'The Mervyn Thompson controversy: A feminist deconstructive reading'. New Zealand Sociology 10(1), May. __ _, (1993) 'Feminism's restless undead: The essential(ist) activist'. Selected Proceedings of 'Bring a Plate': The Feminist Cultural Studies Conference, University of Melbourne, December. Bell, Vikki (1991). 'Beyond the "thorny question": Feminism, Foucault and the desexualisation of rape'. International Journal of the Sociology of Law 19:83-100. Bland, Lucy (1981). 'The domain of the sexual: A response'. Screen Education 39 (Summer): 56-67. Butler, Judith (1987). 'Variations on sex and gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault', in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (eds) Feminism as critique. London: Basil Blackwelt pp.128-142. __ _, (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Cohen, (ed.) (1988). 'Foucauldian necrologies: "gay"' "politics"? politically gay?' Textual Practice, 2(1):87-101. Comer, Peter (1991). 'Mervyn writes his own farewell'. NZ Women's Weekly, 18 March, p.24. de Lauretis, Teresa (1984). Alice doesn't. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. __ _, (1987). Technologies ofgender: Essays on theory, film, and fiction. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Diamond, Irene, and Lee Quinby, (eds) (1988). Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and punish, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. __ _, (1980a). The history ofsexuality. Volume 1: An introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. __ _, (1980b ). 'Body /power', in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, pp.55-62. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1980c). 'Questions on geography'. Interview by editors of Herodote. In Power/ knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed.) pp.63-77. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1980d). 'Two lectures', in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, pp.78-108. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshalt John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester.
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__ _, (1980e). 'Truth and power', in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, pp.109-33. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1980f). 'The history of sexuality', in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, pp.183-93. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1984). 'What is Enlightenment?', in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1988). 'The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom', in James Bernhauer and David Rasmussen (eds) The Final Foucault. Massachusetts: MIT Press. __ _, (1989). 'Sexual choice, sexual act'. lnterv. and trans. James O'Higgins, in Sylvere Lotringer (ed.) Foucault live (interviews, 1966-84), pp.211-31. New York: Semiotext(e). Grant, A.K. (1984). 'The silencing of Uncle Scrim'. NZ Listene,r 28 April, p.29. Jay, Nancy (1981). 'Gender and dichotomy'. Feminist Studies 7(1):38-56. MacKinnon, Catharine (1982). 'Feminism, marxism, method and the state: An agenda for theory'. Signs 7(3):515-44. __ _, (1983) 'Feminism, marxism, method and the state: Toward feminist jurisprudence'. Signs 8(4):635-58. __ _, (1989) Toward afeminist theory ofthe state. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Marcus, Sharon (1992). 'Fighting bodies, fighting words: A theory and politics of rape prevention', in Judith Butler and Joan Scott, Feminists theorize the political, pp.385-403. New York and London: Routledge. Martin, Biddy (1982). 'Feminism, criticism, and Foucault'. New German Critique 27 (Fall):3-30. McNay, Lois (1992). Foucault and feminism: Power, gender, and the self Cambridge: Polity Press. Morris, Meaghan (1988). 'The pirate's fiancee: Feminists and philosophers, or maybe tonight it'll happen', in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on resistance, pp.21-42. Boston: Northeastern University Press. 'Playwright loses fight with cancer' (1992). The Dominion, 13 July: 16. Plaza, Monique (1980). 'Our costs and their benefits'. m/f4:28-39. Probyn, Elspeth (1993). Sexing the self Gendered positions in cultural studies. London and New York: Routledge. Reid, Bronwen.(1984). 'Convicted by malicious rumour'. NZ Times, 8 April, p.3. Rich, Adrienne (1980). 'Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence'. Signs 5(4):631-60. Riley, Brett (1991). 'Review of Passing through'. Listener and TV Times, 18 March, pp.54-5. Russell, Diana (1984). Sexual exploitation: Rape, child sexual abuse, and workplace harassment. Beverly Hills: Sage. Sawicki, Jana (1991). Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, power and the body. New York: Routledge.
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Singer, Linda (1989). 'True confessions: Cixous and Foucault on sexuality and power', in Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (eds), The thinking muse: Feminism and modern French philosophy, pp.136-55. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Smart, Carol (1989). Feminism and the power of law. London: Routledge. __ _, (1990). 'Law's power, the sexed body, and feminist discourse'. Journal ofLaw and Society 17(2):194-210. Soothill, Keith, and Sylvia Walby (1991). Sex crime in the news. London and New York: Routledge. Soothill, Keith, Sylvia Walby, and Paul Bagguley (1990). 'Judges, the media, and rape'. Journal of Law and Society 17(2):211-33. Thompson, Mervyn (1984a). 'Victims and vengeance'. NZ Listener 14 April, pp.21-3. __ _, (1984b ). 'Letter to the editor'. NZ Times, 6 May, p.8. Wall, Carroll (1984). 'From feminism to fascism'. Metro July: 96-110. Women Against Sexual Harassment (WASH) (1984). 'Women reply'. NZ Listener,2 June, pp.22-3. Wittig, Monique (1982). 'The category of sex'. Feminist Issues 2(2):63-8. __ _, (1985). 'The mark of gender'. Feminist Issues 5(2):3-12. __ _, (1989). 'On the social contract', in Dennis Altman, Carole Vance, Martha Vicinus, Jeffrey Weeks, and others (eds) Homosexuality, which homosexuality? International conference on gay and lesbian studies, pp.239-49, London: GMP. Woodhull, Winifred (1988). 'Sexuality, power, and the question of rape', in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, pp.167-76, Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Normalising Equality: Surveillance and the 'Equitable' Public Servant tJJ. !Jl. Jones But what is philosophy today, I mean philosophical activity, if it is not work which is critical of thought itself? And what is it if, instead oflegitirnising that which we already know, it does not consist in finding out how and how far it might be possible to think differently? (Foucault in Morey 1992:118)
Introduction: Foucault and feminism What can Foucauldian analysis offer to feminist activists struggling to bring gender equity into the practices of government organisations? In this paper I argue that Foucault's 'history of the present', his challenge for us to see ourselves as objects/subjects of specific, historically-located discursive formations, pushes us to be reflexive about political activity in new ways. 1 'Finding out how and how far it might be possible to think differently' is an extremely ambitious project, but necessary, I think, for feminists who want to do more than simply criticise the projects of modernist feminism something that is very easy to do. In my current research my focus is on how discourses of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) constitute gender in New Zealand government organisations. I have chosen this research field as one in which the issues of difference are highly salient and explicitly articulated. Foucault's emphasis on the inevitably strategic nature of all discourse means that our own political discourses- including those of feminism- can themselves be the object of critical scrutiny. This type of reflexiveness is appealing to activists who are already interested in the strategic outcomes of our practices. In this paper I am taking feminism to be a modernist project: this does not necessarily mean that I see feminism as essentially modernist. In fact this very question of the modernism of feminism is at the core of feminist debates about Foucault (eg. Diamond and Quinby 1988; Game 1991; Sawicki 1991; McHoul and Grace 1993; McNay 1992). Rather, I am seeking to problematise the modernism of feminism, in order to argue that Foucault's post-modernism provides a point of interrogation that is useful for us as feminists. This paper then is located in the tensions between feminism as modernism and Foucault as post-modern. Foucault's conception of power presents a radical break from feminism conceived as a modern emancipatory project. Framed as modernism, the characteristics of feminism include a teleological approach to social progress in history; a model of freedom and oppression based on a structural model of power; the concept of a unified and rational subject who can make choices and act as a free agent; and a description of gender as social structure. Foucault's conception of power contests liberatory models whereby the
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oppressed are freed from the effects of power. Foucault claims to show instead that power is always in play, always productive of new discourses, new regimes of truth and so new types of subjects. In the history of the present,ourattentionisonthemeansbywhichpowerproduces-ratherthan liberates - changing subjectivities. In this paper, I draw on Foucault's work to interrogate the feminist and bureaucratic project of EEO. While Foucault may have nothing to say directly about feminism- or even really about gender- he has a great deal to say about the processes of bureaucracy, about what he calls 'governmentality' and its processes. First I introduce the EEO project. I will then discuss Foucault's ideas of governmentality, normalisation and surveillance and consider how they describe some of the effects of this project.
EEO as bureaucracy I agree with what! take to be Foucault's major preoccupation; his belief that the increasing organisation of everything is the central issue of our time. I wish to avoid 'overusing' Foucault. Most people who have read Discipline and punish, no matter how convinced they are of the pervasiveness of the disciplines in modern society, are likely to come away preferring prison to public disembowelling (Ferguson 1984:xii-xiii). EEO is the 'increasing organisation of everything' constituted as a feminist and also as a bureaucratic discourse. Just as we are likely to prefer prison to public disembowelling, feminists are likely to prefer a bureaucratised feminism to an uncontested bureaucratic sexism. In putting 'the feminist case against bureaucracy', Kathy Ferguson (1984:7) cites Foucault in defining bureaucracy as 'the scientific organization of inequality'. Feminist bureaucrats seek to replace the 'organisation of inequality' with 'the organisation of equality'. The project of EEO is to introduce 'equitable' practices into organisations. It is an aspect of a much broader feminist equality project, taking place both within and outside the state apparatus. In this discussion I will focus on EEO in New Zealand government departments. I will also use examples dealing solely with gender equity, although EEO programs characteristically cover other 'target' groups defined by ethnicity, disability, and soon. The strategy ofEEOprograms is currently located within the discourse of strategic human resource management. In fact, the EEO unit in the State Services Commission, the central employment consultancy and policymaking body for New Zealand government organisations, is literally located in the Strategic Human Resource Management section of the Commission. Discourses of strategic human resource management contain a number of assumptions characteristic of modernist bureaucracies. A key one is the assumption of strategic action as functionalist and instrumental, as intentional action carried out by rational modern subjects acting in the interests of efficiency and effectiveness. To this, many government departments would add the goal of equity. By contrast, a Foucauldian approach would see public servants, not as rational free agents implementing strategic policy goals, but rather as objects/subjects produced by bureaucratic discourses of rationality. A
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history of the present represents subjectivity as an effect, not the author or origin, of a given discursive formation. While Foucault's idea of discourse inevitably assumes that discourse is strategic, his concept of the strategic effects of discourse is not a teleological one. It is not the kind of strategy by which an agent controls a cause and effect process, but rather is a strategy which can be read from the effects of the workings of discursive formations in the production of certain types of power relations and certain types of subjects. Political theorist Michael Shapiro has developed an analysis of international political strategy from a Foucauldian perspective, and I will show how it can be applied to other policy areas such as EEO. Shapiro (1992:109) argues that there are two main ways in which the discourse of international relations is strategic in Foucault's sense. First, 'at an explicit or recognized level in that it maps the world into warring camps and strategic alliances'. In the discourse ofEEO, difference between members of the organisation are strategically organised in terms of advantage and disadvantage in terms of the goal of equality. The 'disadvantaged' are then framed as 'target groups' in terms of a strategic 'EEO plan'. In her analysis of American welfare policies Nancy Fraser has pointed out that both the identities and needs of welfare 'target groups' are 'interpreted identities and needs. Moreover, they are highly political interpretations and as such are in principle subject to dispute' (Fraser 1989:153). Similarly, the identities and needs of EEO 'target groups' are created in the competing discourses of EEO. These include the different discourses of the 'target groups' themselves, which both overlap and come into conflict at different times and sites; and what Fraser calls the "'expert" needs discourses' of groups such as policy analysts and human resources consultants. These discourses 'compete with one another in addressing the fractured social identities of potential adherents'. In the centre of this struggle are the members of EEO target groups, dealing with questions of identity, difference and power, on the most personal level of subjectivity and on the broad level of the social, defined by Fraser as 'a terrain of contestation... a space in which conflicts among rival interpretations of peoples' needs are played out' (Fraser 1989:153). On the level of the social, key questions of strategy are formulated in terms of categories of difference. In defining 'EEO groups', a highly diverse range of social categories is yoked together on the premise that the groups are those to whom 'equal opportunity' has been denied. EEO discourse creates and regulates categories of difference which are reduced to a kind of equivalence. The paradox is that although recognising a type of difference- unequal access to certain 'opportunities' available to dominant social groups- EEO erases others. Each EEO group has its own discourses, which may be more less compatible with the discourse of EEO as a regulating concept. So at Shapiro's first level of strategic discourse, the discourse of EEO divides populations into the more and less equal, the advantaged and the disadvantaged. While the boundaries and 'needs discourses' of groups may be contested, the process of mapping itself is not. This kind of mapping is essential to modernist social projects of both bureaucracy and feminism. As Kathy Ferguson (1988:67)
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puts it, 'it is very difficult to speak of liberation without some notion of a subject whose life will be improved in some way, or to envisage political change at all without some idea of who will bring it about and why'. As an overtlypoliticised discourse, feminism is much more likely to think of different population groups as 'warring camps and strategic alliances', in Shapiro's terms, than are bureaucrats. There is a tension here between a bureaucratic regime in which inequalities and therefore differences are to be transformed to equivalences, and a feminist regime in which differences are not eradicated along with inequalities. This tension underlies the 'mapping' process, and I will return to it later. Shapiro (1992:109) goes on to describe a second level at which discourse acts strategically 'in the sense that it participates in a linguistic or discursive economy of power and authority by holding sway over other possible representations of the world'. Shapiro emphasises 'a view that places discourse within a metaphor of political economy', and cites Foucault's description of discourse as an 'asset'. This 'economic' view of discourses draws attention to their value not as truth, but, in Foucault's words, to 'their possibility for transformation... in the administration of scarce resources'. Of course EEO practitioners see their interventions as strategic, but they see strategy operating on a different level from that of the discursive in a Foucauldian sense. EEO practitioners intervene to insert statements about equality, framed in terms of the bureaucratic ethos of rationality, efficiency and economy, into the discourses of human resource management. These interventions are reflected in policy documents such as departmental strategic plans and EEO plans. A Foucauldian perspective suggests however that such interventions do not work at a simple functional level, in terms of a kind of transparent and rational planning process in which equality is put on the agenda and rational implementation programs are produced in order to eliminate inequality. They work rather by setting up 'an economy of linguistic practices, a circulation of silences versus volubilities and of dominant versus subjugated modes of statements and knowledge practices',asShapiroputsit(1992:109).AFoucauldiananalysisofEEOwouldask then: what are its silences and its volubilities? Which knowledges are dominant and which subjugated? I have argued that Foucault's idea of discourse inevitably assumes that discourse is strategic, in terms of a kind of a strategy which can be read from the effects of the workings of discursive formations in the production of certain types of power relations and certain types of subjects. I am reading the discourse of EEO then in terms of one of its key effects: that of producing a certain kind of object/ subject: the equitable public servant. Shapiro (1992:2) has pointed out the 'violence' of the imagery in which Foucault describes the way that discourses produce subjects as their objects. In describing the 'person' as a body on the surface of which events are inscribed, Foucault' defamiliarises' our interpretation of the person. Instead of rendering the person as a cognitive agent - for instance, the familiar subject of managerialist discourses of human resource management, a subject who can be 'trained' or persuaded to adopt equitable attitudes and practices-Foucaultgivesusa'passivereceptorofmeanings',andanewway
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to think of how a certain type of 'person' is produced. It is interesting that something of the violence of Foucault's concept of objects produced by discourses is echoed in the attitudes of EEO practitioners towards male public servants who are seen to resist EEO policies: 'I don't care what they think any more, I just want them to have to behave a certain way'. A split is made here between the bodies and the minds of public servants. As long as their bodies are disciplined by corporate EEO strategies, as long as they promote the right number of women; carry out interviews based on merit principles, monitor training targets, and so on, they are' good enough' equitable public servants. From a Foucauldian perspective, it is not managers acting as free agents who produce certain strategic effects, but rather discourses which produce managerial subjects. From this perspective, strategic managerialism is an effect of certain discourses, and bureaucrats are the subjects/ objects, not the agents, of managerial discourse. EEO practitioners, in this way, are subjects too of the discourses of bureaucracy and managerialism, of regulation and of strategy. At the same time, they see themselves as free agents, producing emancipatory social change through strategic action. What they share with bureaucracy and managerialism is this belief in strategic action.
Govemmentality Foucault's concept of 'governmentality' is closely associated with a certain kind of professional subject. Terry Johnson has developed an analysis of the production of certain kinds of professional'expertise' as a key effect of the form of government- governmentality- that Foucault sees as characterising modernity. This 'governmentality' is not that of the state as a 'coherent, calculating subject' but of the state as 'the residue or outcome of governing' (Johnson 1993:140). This form of governing involves both state and nonstate institutions. In the case of EEO practitioners, it could be said that their positioning in the discourses of 'human resource management' is as much an aspect of their 'fusion' -as Johnson puts it- with the strategies and technologies of governmentality, as is their positioning as bureaucrats in a government department. In his Foucauldian analysis of the discourses of Human Resource Management (HRM), Nikolas Rose (1988:185). has identified the importance of the authority it derives from the discourses of the psychological sciences, which made possible 'a form of rational regulation of individuality' He follows here Foucault's emphasis on the importance of the discourses of the 'human sciences' in analysing governmentality. As Rose puts it, the psychological sciences made possible 'new practices of regulation', and meant that 'the management of the human factor in the institutions of modern social life could now operate in terms of a norm of truth; that is to say, in terms of a knowledge of subjectivity which had the authority of science'. As an aspect of HRM practice, EEO is located among the personal-service professions that are both 'the progenitors and beneficiaries' of the 'complex network of governmentality', in Johnson's words. As 'experts' they have a particular role in 'the reproduction of the self-regulating subject' (Johnson 1993:143), while they themselves are also certain kinds of self-regulating subjects. There is a kind of triple positioning here: first, as professional
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public servants, EEO practitioners are 'experts' who produce a certain kind of self-regulating subject in the population. For instance, in the Department of Social Welfare, experts produce a certain kind of subject as social welfare beneficiary through an 'expert needs discourse. Secondly, as human resource management practitioners, their 'expertise' produces a certain kind of public servant. AB EEO practitioners, they are focussed on producing an 'equitable' public servant. And thirdly, they are themselves produced as subjects of their professional discourses, as well as other discourses which may be relevant- for instance, the discourses of feminism. My attention is this paper is on the second kind of positioning, on the production of the 'equitable' public servant in the discourses of Equal Employment Opportunity. Foucault's ideas of normalisation and surveillance are basic to my analysis of how the equitable public servant is produced. Nina Sawicki (1991:85) has argued that the' emphasis on normalisation' is'a major advantage of the disciplinary model of power'. Normalisation is the process by which norms are discursively produced, and is necessary for the government of life processes. It operates, in Sawicki's words, 'by inciting desire, attaching individuals to specific identities, and addressing real needs' Disciplinary power is effective when physical violence is not required. Surveillance, or panopticism, aligns the object/ subject with the norm. This alignment does not occur through 'forcing' an individual to act a certain way, regardless of his or her 'private beliefs'. From that point of view, which is the one traditional in the public service ethos, monitoring processes are essential to continue to maintain the external force and ensure ongoing compliance. However Foucault's idea of panopticism does not make this distinction between 'inside' and 'outside', and its key effect is that the individual disciplines him or her self. Panopticism makes certain aspects of life visible, that is, open to surveillance. In order to make surveillance function permanently and independently, the technologies of surveillance must be able to create and sustain 'a power relation independent of the person who exercises it'. The objects of power then become 'caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers' (Foucault 1977:201). The concept of normalisation draws our attention to the 'strategies and technologies' whereby subjects are created. Johnson develops Foucault's work by asking questions about the kind of professional'expertise' involved in this production: 'how and where does this expertise get stored, produced and embodied?'. In particular, Johnson is interested in the production of 'individuals, highly trained and socialised in accordance with an agreed ethical and disciplinary code' (Johnson 1993:144).2 EEO represents a major intervention in the 'agreed ethical and disciplinary code' of public service bureaucracy. If governmentality, or'government rationality', makes certain forms of governing activity 'thinkable and practicable both to its practitioners and to those upon whom it [is] practiced' (Gordon 1991:3), then it is interesting to consider how EEO has become both 'thinkable and practicable' in bureaucratic discourse. It is particularly interesting in that EEO derives at least in part from the oppositional discourses of feminism. I will consider below how EEO meshes with the discourses of bureauc-
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racy in terms of practices of normalisation and surveillance. I will also consider how the outcomes of these processes can be viewed. But first I want to briefly consider gender as a product of bureaucratic discourses.
The gendered subject of the public servant Clearly gender differences are produced across a range of discursive positions: in fact I would argue that all modern subjects are gendered. My interest is in how this gendered and racialised positioning works in government organisations, and, in particular, in the kind of difference that is produced in discourses of EEO. The kind of public servant produced by traditional public service discourses was masculine. The discourses of EEO serve to make visible the previously invisible mechanisms by which this subject was produced, the processes of normalisation and surveillance by which this exclusionary process was both 'thinkable and practicable'. The discourses of EEO named such processes in terms of 'discrimination', of sexism. One of the effects of the discourse of EEO is to continue to make visible the processes by which the male public servant continues to be produced and privileged in the discourses of the public service. Sites that are identified by EEO programs include, for instance, recruitment, training and promotion processes, exclusionary language, harassment, and leave policies. Foucault (1977) has described how medical discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced the subject of the sexual deviant, and, as a corollary, an increasing subjection of that subject to the technologies of normalisation and surveillance. Just as there was an 'enormous explosion of discourse and concern' about sexuality and the body, as Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983:140) put it there has been an 'enormous explosion of discourse and concern' about gender over the last twenty years. In New Zealand government organisations, the discourse ofEEO has proliferated at an official level over the last ten years. In identified sites such as that of the recruitment interview, the gendered nature of both interviewer and interviewee are rendered highly visible by EEO discourses. The gender of the interview panel, the candidates and the eventual appointee have become highly visible and open to surveillance in terms of statistical aggregation and possible interrogation through review processes. Paradoxically, this process of making difference highly visible is linked with a bureaucratic rhetoric of 'merit' by which difference is made visible in order to be erased as a factor in appointments. Two types of surveillance or panopticism in Foucault's terms are going on in such an interview. First the interview process itself is surveyed for traces of gender difference which must be somehow cleansed so that 'merit' applies without the traces of sexism. Statistical technologies are deployed to measure the relationship between candidate and appointee gender, to ensure the absence of sexist discrimination. Secondly, the interview subject is surveyed in a kind of confessional process to ensure that they are the type of 'equitable' public servant that can be or aligned with the corporate discourses of equality. Subjects are required for instance to 'demonstrate a commitment' to 'equal employment opportunity principles' or 'the Treaty of Waitangi'.
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The relationship between the technology of the confessional and the production of the subject of the equitable public servant is a critical one. As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983:175) put it, Foucault's thesis is that 'the key to the technology of the self is the belief that one can, with the help of experts, tell the truth about oneself'. Foucault contests this belief by arguing that the self is not revealed but is produced by the technologies of the confessional. Public service discourse has a characteristic framing of the relationship between the professional 'truth' and the personal 'truth' of the public servant. It is traditional in public service discourse that the public servant administers government policy regardless of his or her own political beliefs. This separation of public and private renders what may be seen as the interiority of the subject as nondiscursive. Thus EEO practitioners can say of resistant public servants 'I don't care what they think any more, I just want them to have to behave a certain way'. This position follows and responds to an emancipatory approach to anti-sexism practices, which assumes a kind of consciousness-raising model drawn from community work and feminist discourses. It addresses the problem of changing hearts and minds on equality issues. This approach is that it is intended to empower the disempowered, and is not seen as appropriate for the already powerful. Feminists tend to be sceptical of the value of 'rational' appeals to already empowered male public servants, and so, although maintaining in some ways a model of rationality, turn instead to 'carrot and stick' approaches to implement EEO programs. Foucault's approach to the constitution of the self in discursive formations is not an emancipatory one, nor is it based on any intrinsic or cognitive rationality. Because there is no subject prior to discourse, there is no truth of the self to be either revealed or concealed, and there is no truth about the self which can be revealed to the self. Foucault argued that medical discourses produced a highly visible and voluble sexuality, inevitably implicated in the production of a highly visible and voluble deviant sexuality. Similarly we could argue that EEO discourse produces a highly visible gendering of public servants, and a deviant gendering characterised as sexism. This discourse of gender seeks to replace the prior and still active discourse of sexism, in terms of which femaleness was deviant. This replacement involves making sexist discourse visible and then deviant. This is not then an emancipatory process, but in Foucault's terms, an attempt to replace one regime of truth by another, to produce a new kind of subject. Having pointed out that a Foucauldian perspective subverts the project of emancipation, it is also important to highlight the oppositional nature of the feminist discourses of EEO, to distinguish them from traditional sexist discourses while at the same time remarking on the similarities in the ways that they work to produce subjects within regimes of truth. Foucault's idea of resistance was that it takes place always and only within a certain existing discursive context: that 'a strategic manoeuvre must be countered by an opposing manoeuvre; a set of tactics must be consciously invented in opposition to the setting in place of another', as McHoul and Grace put it (1993:84).
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This counter-manoeuvring can be seen in the processes of surveillance through EEO produces the equitable public servant. McHoul and Grace point out that all disciplinary instruments and procedures 'involve some form or unequal intercourse between two agents or parties' (1993:71). Surveillance means one-way observation: 'the subject of surveillance does not have the reciprocal power to 'observe' the observer'. Applied to an interview situation, we can see that in an examination 'it is only the subject of power who undergoes this trial; it is set by someone already possessing the skills or knowledge the other is seeking'. The success of feminists in turning the lens of the Panopticon upon bureaucratic procedures and subjects is, on reflection, quite extraordinary. Gordon (1991:27) sees liberal government as typically 'focussing... the state's immediate interest in disciplinary technique largely on the organisation of its own staffs and apparatuses'. Public servants are as inspectable as the populations they administer, and both groups are subject to the disciplinary techniques of public policy flowing from feminist oppositional discourses.
Some questions and problems in thinking EEO differently In the 'final' analysis, proof of the value of using Foucault for feminism will
be in the puddings, that is, in the practical implications that adopting his methods and insights will have. Attending to the exigencies of feminist practice will sometimes require that we either ignore Foucault or move beyond him (Sawicki 1991:109). EEO does not 'liberate' women but produces another kind of public servant. Could there be a relationship between the productive technologies of EEO and the persistence of 'inequality', even viewed from within the framework of the knowledges of EEO, the EEO plans and outcomes? I will conclude by suggesting not some answers but some questions raised for activists by my attempt to think EEO differently. I have argued against the modernist model of liberation, and instead have drawn on the work of Foucault to think EEO differently as a discourse which produces a certain kind of public servant. I have given examples of how the modernist assumptions of bureaucratic discourses are shared by feminists working within bureaucracies- people who are themselves the subjects of the discourses of bureaucracy. These assumptions frame the context in which feminists have developed a counter-discourse of anti-sexism, framed as a discourse of 'equality'. EEO practitioners see themselves as working within an emancipatory mode as well as within the discourses of bureaucracy. While they are frequently aware of the contradictions between these discursive positions in terms of gender issues, they are perhaps less aware of the ways they reinforce each other. For instance, do they see themselves as 'the directors of conscience', in Foucault's words, (in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:140), extending administrative control through a counter discourse which works through the state apparatus? A major current concern among feminists is with the ways that feminism itself can operate as a discourse of power that tends to both fix and universalise gender, and exclude both women and men from its universe. AsJudithButlerputsit,anyattempttouniversalisetheexperienceofwomen
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'inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category' (1990:4). A regulatory approach to deal with issues of gender inevitably fixes what gender is and means, inevitably speaks and is silent about some experiences of gender and not others. This regulatory approach creates effects that are paradoxical in terms of an emancipatory agenda. Another key question is whether or not the equitable public servant is produced as gendered? Is the public servant to be the traditional neutral instrument of the state, whose approach to gender has no reference to his or her own gender positioning? This seems totally impossible in the context of the multiple effects of gender in all social sites. On the other hand, the gender differentiated public servant with 'different' needs- in the case of women, usually framed in terms of a deficit- may simply be reinscription of gender difference. There also seems to me to be a problem in terms of how to address the resistance of many public servants to EEO discourses. Where does sexism 'go'? Is it 'cleansed'; or does it become masked/invisible? Is sexism 'in' men but not 'in' women? These questions are not unlike some of those being asked within a modernist framework by practitioners themselves, but I argue that a Foucauldian approach stresses the productiveness of EEO discourse, as against an instrumental approach to implementation which sidesteps issues of subjectivity, language, difference, and focuses instead on what I believe is a spurious pragmatism of organisational change. 1
Thanks to Lynda Davies for suggestions on this paper at an early stage.
2
I note that both the terms 'socialisation' and 'training' are terms derived from a different context from that in which Foucault's analysis takes place.
References Dreyfus, H and Rabinow, P. (1983). Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferguson, K. (1984). The feminist case against bureaucracy. Philadelphia, P.A.: Temple University Press. __ _, (1988). 'Subject-centredness in feminist discourse', in Jones, K. and Jonasdottir, A. (eds), The political interests of gender: developing theory and research with a feminist face, pp.66-78. London: Sage. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. London: Allen Lane. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: power, discourse and gender in contemporary society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Game, A. (1991 ). Undoing the social: towards a deconstructive sociology. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Gordon, C. (1991). 'Government rationality: an introduction', in G. Burchell et al. (eds), The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality, pp.1-51. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, T. (1993). 'Expertise and the state', in Game, M. and Johnson, T. (eds), Foucault's new domains, pp.139-152. London: Routledge.
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McHoul, A and Grace, W. (1993). The Foucault primer: discourse, power, and the subject. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. McNay, L. (1992). Foucault and feminism: power, gender, and the self Cambridge: Polity Press. Morey,M.(1992).'0nMichelFoucault'sphilosophicalstyle:towardsacritiqueofthe normal', in Armstrong, T. (ed.), Michel Foucault: philosopher, pp.117-127. New York: Harvester /Wheatsheaf. Rose, N. (1988). 'Calculable minds and manageable individuals', History of the Human Sciences, 1(2):179-200. Sawicki, J. (1991). Disciplining Foucault: feminism, power and the body. New York: Routledge. Shapiro, M. (1992). Reading the postmodern polity: political theory as textual practice . Minneapolis, MINN.: University of Minnesota Press. Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. London: Basil Blackwell.
Part Seven Truth, Law and Medicine
The Production of Truth: Body and Soul Part 1: 'Telling Truths': Truth Telling in the Judicial Process
There is a story told in Jewish mythology that relates that in a time of yore, men made the figure of a man of clay. The miraculous name of God was pronounced and the clay figure came to life. On his forehead was written 'emeth' the word to represent truth. They called him 'golem' and used him as a servant. Soon he grew stronger than all other men. Out of fear they erased the first letter so that 'meth' 'he is dead' was now written on his forehead. The golem collapses and returns to clay again. The story of the golem serves as a narrative to introduce this paper about truth in its allegorical rather than its literal sense. The aim is not to re-define the dominant narratives around truth and the body, but by re-telling snatches of some of the stories already told, to nuance the contours of the some of the silences. Narratives in the dominant mode, are in a way already representations of power. What is presented here is by way of a broken narrative, intended only to make strange some of the more familiar and dominant narratives about truth and the body. It is not intended as a new dominant narrative. What is most striking about juridical truth practices for us is the hierarchical and hermeneutic nature of the narratives. In a sense, this same structure is to be found in most dominant narratives. The strategic relationship between truth and the body which juridical practice produces is of interest here as an aspect of the much broader practices of dominance and subordination in the context of the desired democratic practices of equality and difference. Indeed, desired practices of equality and difference will serve in this paper as an implied counter-narrative to dominant stories of domination, homogeneity and silence. The juridical stories retold here are selected around the themes of confessions, torture, slavery and truth. We note in passing that in the majority of criminal trials today there is no formal contest as such about the facts or the 'truth' of the allegations. Most verdicts of guilty are the result of admissions, pleas of guilty and confessions. We take as our focus the centrality of the confession either as such, or in the form of admissions and pleas of guilty in the practices of the criminal courts. Indeed both in the evidential and penitential sense, confession is vital to criminal and the related penal practices. The modest claim is that in these confessional/ penitential rituals, we witness again the strategic dramaturgy, if not liturgy, associated with the sin, sacrifice, submission, suffering and sadism of inquisitions of old in order to produce the contemporary 'truth' of our subjectivity and subjection. In this part of the paper, of course, it should be clear that I use 'truth' in its discursive sense, telling stories about truth and the uses to which truth can be put. It is part of a mode of becoming, obtained through experiences
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located in specific spaces, bodies and time. It obeys no immutable laws but follows from the free flow of events and specific social and public practices. In figurative terms 'truth' is here perhaps better regarded as a 'tum' or a 'conceit' (if not deceit). Truth here is tropical. We are concerned with what has been said by Barthes to be the 'lure of truth'. Central to any consideration of confession/penitential practice is the nature of the relationship that it demands to the self. Self-examination or examination/interrogation by teacher or master is one of the issues dealt with by Foucault in his Howison Lectures at Berkeley in October 1980. Under the title 'Truth and Subjectivity' or 'About the beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self', Foucault traces what he calls the genealogy of the subject to mark the point where techniques of domination and coercion meet with the practices/techniques of the self. He claims that for the Greek/ Roman and early Christian man, the practice of self examination was a sort of truth-game as opposed to a truth obligation. He gives the example of Seneca and notes that in his self-examination he uses the language of the administrator in relation to himself. He recalls his faults, not to punish himself. He remembers I memorises them to re-awaken fundamental philosophical principles. He does not do this to discover hidden secrets but to recall forgotten truths. Here we find an already constituted subject whose 'truth' was not in issue and hence not in need of interpretation. We find a male adult citizen for whom the practice of self-examination, the injunction to 'know yourself', was an ethical practice. A practice where one either alone or with the help of a mentor/master measured the distance between one's truth and one's will against an ideal unity of truth and will. The relationship between master and disciple was one that was instrumental and provisional. The teachings or pedagogical practices were the skills of memory and rhetoric. Contrast the monastic practices around the command/injunction/ obligation of 'tell your faults' to a spiritual director, who interpreted, judged and forgave in the name of God. Now the self-examination is interpretive and contradictory, and must be spoken to a superior auditor. The will and truth now are God's higher demands. The duty now is permanent obedience, and sacrifice of bodily self. This sinful self stands in the way of God's truth. It must be denied, policed, scrutinised, and renounced, All traces of the bodily self and its desires must be erased and announced as the errors they are. But not just erased in silence but a renunciation perpetually voiced to be heard and audited by another who stood in the stead of the highest and ultimate unity of will and truth. The agon with the self must be verbalised, disembodied and yet made flesh. These practices were aimed at the elimination of the 'other' tainted sinful evil self. Pain and torment, sacrifice and suffering were the signs: punishment/ repentance I atonement the remedy. These penitential practices harnessed three grand metaphors, the medical concern with cure and healing, the judicial repertoire of repentance, atonement, appeasement, and finally a martyrdom of the body and its passions to achieve a break with one's fallen, debased and impure self. Now one has only a truth obligation, a permanent relationship of obedience, and a perpetual penitential policing of the soul to produce the pure dis-embodied and absent ideal
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and true self. For Foucault this demand for sacrifice is critical to confessional practice and the interpretive or hermeneutic subject so produced. One renounces one's will either by obedience and or a symbolic staging of one's own death. Hence the impossibility of truth without pain or sacrifice. In the confessional utterances we have the speech of submission and the ritual language of subordination. Indeed we have an institutionalised truth practice that demands and constructs the sacrificial subject through the dynamics of subordinated self and a superior spiritual auditor. In the heyday of the Greek polis, two methods of arriving at juridical truth were practised, torture for the slave and testimony for the citizen. The verdict was given by the specially assembled jury of equals, other adult males fellow citizens. In the shadows of this magnificently self-conscious equality and homogeneity, roamed the shame of a truth extracted from screaming bodies, bodies otherwise deemed incapable of speaking truthfully - that is logically, mindfully, rationally and therefore persuasively. Truth in the slave was ontological, to be born in and through pain. Inherrecentstudyoftorture and truth, Page DuBois claims that, 'the very idea of truth we receive from the Greeks. Those ancestors whom Allan Bloom names for us, are inextricably linked with the practice of torture, which has almost always been the attempt to discover a secret 'always out of reach' (DuBois 1991:7). She tells us that the Greek word for torture is 'basanos' or touchstone. The touchstone was a dark coloured stone which when rubbed on pure gold leaves left a mark. Bankers and money-changers of the time used scales and touch-stones to test, to assess, to examine the multiplicity of coins circulating throughout Aegean world. Poetically 'basanos' was used as a metaphor for separating the good from the base. Sophocles for example uses 'basanos' as a method for testing or proving. DuBois quotes the scholar Jean Pierre Vernant in his study of Greek tragedy as noting the close analogy between the dramas that unfolded in the judicial arena and the stuff of tragic theatre: The tragic writers' use of a technical legal vocabulary underlies the affinities between the most favoured tragic themes and certain cases that fell within the competence of the courts. The tragic poet makes use of this vocabulary, deliberately exploiting its ambiguities, its fluctuations and its incompleteness. We find an imprecision in the terms used, shifts of meaning, incoherences and contradictions all of which reveal the disagreements within legal thought itself (DuBois 1991:20).
'Basanos', touchstone, became the figurative' to test', 'to torture', hence the testing of human bodies in the judicial procedures of Athenian courts. The torture of slaves figured as the guarantor of truth in the process of truthmaking. The testimony of the master had to be supplemented by that extracted from the tortured body of his slave. Ironically, as evidence, it was considered a superior truth to the 'feigned' testimony of the master. It was oracular in its impact, estranged, differently voiced, from another place, perhaps from a higher order. Its power to persuade was at least quasimystical. For the rationalist Aristotle, the slave was a part of the master, a part of his body, as it were, alive yet separate. So, rather conveniently, the master's truth lies buried in the body of his slave and may only be revealed
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through torture. The testimony of the slave was not admissible in judicial proceedings unless it had been obtained though torture. Again, the refusal of a master to have his slave put to torture weighed heavily as evidence against him. Torture then in the Athenian court played a double role, sociopolitical and veridical, it marked out the slave from the citizen, and guarantied the truth claims of the master I citizen. Of course everyone was aware of the fragility and danger and certainly the logical limitations of such a truth pain relationship. But this did not matter and certainly did not stand in the way of the practice. In sum, there were two ways that evidence was presented in the courts of Athens, the testimony of the citizen/ contestants, and his witnesses as to the facts and credit-worthiness of the disputants. This was conducted in the form of a contest between equals. Then there was the truth of the slave as a necessary corroboration. Now it was up to the assembled citizen/jury of equals to put an end to dispute and ambiguity and come to a verdict... to at last speak the final'truth'. DuBois claims: In the Athenian legal system truth is considered to reside elsewhere, in the body of the slave. It cannot be arrived at through the process of debate and
exchange; the scene in the courtroom, in which defendant and prosecutor speak on their own behalf, cannot be relied upon to provide the truth required for the court's decision. The truth, this a-letheia, this unforgetting, must be obtained in another scene. That scene is the scene of another exchange, the scene of torture, where the torturer employs not the logos, not speech, but his implements of iron. Here the tortured slave receives the attentions of the court, mediated by the body of the torturer, and here he or she is thought to deliver up from the space of forgetting the sought-after prize. The agon, the contestofthe plaintiff and defendant in the court, is replaced by another agon, that enacted between the city's torturer and the slave implicated in the events of a lawsuit. The metaphysical representation of truth as residing beyond, within, somewhere else, is replicated, produced, reproduced, mimed, in the scene of torture. And it is this ancient, traditional, religious view of truth contested by democratic process, by selection according to lot, by mass debate in the agora and assembly- that anchors philosophical practice, that of many of the pre-Socratics, that of Plato, that of his modem critic Martin Heidegger (DuBois 1991:137).
From the juridical practice of torture, it does not take too much imagination to see the birth of a philosophic notion truth, a notion associated with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and their battle against the Sophists. This is the view of a truth that is Other, hidden, secret, immutable, divine, eternal and universal. It is a truth that only the philosopher or enlightened citizen can interpret and evaluate. Plato thought that the sophist, like the slave may apprehend (in the sense of see) truth, but could not 'possess' or 'know' it. Sophists then like slaves could only mimic truth. Their speech accordingly was empty, feigned and false. By contrast, the speech of the philosopher was full, true and full in the possession of knowledge arrived at after due dialectical disputation, cross-examination, refutation and testing. For Plato, logic and dialectic are police arts, to discipline and arrest the otherwise freechatter of dangerous words. So Sophist and slave alike could be forced to deliver up truth's secrets so that philosophers could interpret and evaluate them. Witness the birth of the sovereignty of rational discourse, a dialectics
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of truth, superior and required to police the duplicitous, error prone character of mere feelings. In this view, truth can only be summoned up or achieve articulate form through interpretative procedures applied by a rational male philosopher. Witness the birth of the hermeneutic subject/ object of knowledge. The hierarchy of knowers of truth arrived at by the mastery, monopoly and power of philosophers/interpreters and other bodies to be known. Bartlett in his study of the medieval judicial ordeal describes it as more powerful that any clash of words. The ordeal was only used when other means of establishing truth were not available. These other means were, oath-swearing, oath compurgation, witnesses, written evidence, and inquests. The most common cases where the ordeal by fire or water was used, were heresy, adultery and other sexual misconduct by wives, dishonesty, murder and theft by night. Apart from the type of offence in question, the other variable in the decision to use the ordeal was the social status of the accused, for example, the free-man as opposed to the bondsman, the noble as opposed to the peasant, the wife as opposed to the husband, the monk as opposed to the bishop. The first task of the medieval court was to decide the oath-worthiness of the accused and hence the most appropriate way of putting him or her to the proof. Bartlett tells us that a large body of legal material makes it clear that compurgation and sometimes, the duel, was the proof of the free, the ordeal that of the unfree, although legally all could be put to the ordeal. In its sociopolitical context the judicial ordeal served both a veridical and punitive (that is deterrent) function as well as of course aiding the Church in its struggle for power. For the Church authorities the ordeal became problematic as a means of signifying truth. Bartlett is interested in the way that the 'rationality' of the ordeal gave way to its decline and characterisation as 'irrational'. He cites Aquinas as teaching that the ordeal by the hot iron or water is illicit because a miraculous effect is required of God. Unlike those historians who would see the decline of the ordeal as a veridical practice in the rise of a new naturalism or rationalism, he claims that the scholastic criticism of the ordeal reflected a new and more rigorous metaphysics or ontology: natural, miraculous, and sacramental (Bartlett 1986:87). He speculates that perhaps the only way to save the ordeal would have been to make it a sacrament. However the ordeal fell between all three orders ofreality.Itwasnotnatural,itwasblasphemoustospeakofitasmiraculous, as if miracles could be invoked at the whim of the human. The only alternative was that the Church made it a sacrament, that is a divine intervention invoked by the power of the Church. The only guaranteed supernatural events were the sacraments, and these had to be canonical. The objections of people like Aquinas that the ordeal was uncanonical and in effect demanded a miracle effectively won the day and the ordeal was robbed of its licit status as a supernatural process. The debate about the ordeal was not one as to its truth, it was a crisis of power and authority. It died when its charter was removed by the authority of the Church and replaced by the sacrament of penance. What is more interesting from this period is that the swimming of witches survived right to the nineteenth
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century. This practice as well as the trial by combat survived, as they were never officially sanctioned or their truth guaranteed by the Church. With the decline of the ordeal there emerged three main changes in the area of proof, an extension of existing proofs, moves towards trial by jury, especially in England, and perhaps, most importantly, the rise of torture to extract a confession, now regarded as the ultimate proof of the truth of any allegation. In a detailed and long term history of torture, Edward Peters warns us to be mindful of the judicial aspect of torture. Whether used as a part of the juridical veridical practice or as an instrument of state, torture was always a judicial/ public use of pain. It was in essence a public use of torment to enquire after truth. We note with him 'tormentum', 'torquens mentum', the twisting and turning of the mind by the suffering body. Peters claims that from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, confession was the 'queen of proofs' in judicial proceedings. He claims that, it may be said that the value associated with the confession offered a kind of protection to the new procedures that evolved. Confession ascended to the top of the hierarchy of proofs and remained there long after the Romano I Canonicalinquisitorial procedure and the procedure oftrial by jury had come to be firmly in place themselves. For jurists and lay-people alike, confession was the 'regina probationum' the queen of proofs ... lt is the importance of confession upon which hinges, if not, the revival then surely the spread and integration of torture into the legal system of the thirteenth century (Peters 1985:45).
We should also note that, of course, the experts of the day were well aware of the dangers and paradoxes of confessions gained under torture. So with Peters, we note the caution and circumspection that surrounded the official discourse and academic writing around torture and the practice manuals for judges and torturers. Strict protocols and caution were the watchwords. The admonitions were that torture only be used as a last resort, and not to cause death or serious injury, that a notary had to be present to make an official record of the proceedings and finally of course there had to be a medical official to 'monitor' proceedings. However, the ultimate safeguard of the confessions 'truth' was that only if the confession extracted under torture was repeated in a place away from the torture chamber could it be admitted against the accused. Of course if he/ she failed to so repeat, the torture would start again! So while all concerned were well aware that torture was a practice 'res fragilis et periculosa' nevertheless the judge at the end of the day, after hearing the circumstantial evidence and the supervising of the torture and consequent confession, was able to announce the verdict to say I speak the truth of the matter and order the appropriate punishment. Peters tells us that: From its origins as a practical police tactic to its position as a recognised part of Romano/Canonicallegal procedure- torture was consistently employed by the courts whose personnel were not always academically trained experts and it is doubtful that the carefully guarded 'consilia' and academic treatises ever had much influence except in offering a judicial ideal for actual magistrates and torturers (Peters 1985:62).
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Langbein in his influential study of torture and the law of proof divides his story into judicial torture in England and contrasts that to its practice in continental Europe. In Europe, judicial torture was governed by the Romancanon law of evidence. Judicial torture involved the use of pain by officials of state in order to gather evidence for judicial proceedings. Langbein's approach is remarkable for its clinical, if not sanitised description of these legal practices. He claims that torture as part of the judicial investigation should not be confused with punishment. He vehemently argues that the reasons for the disappearance of torture from the judicial repertoire of truth practices, were juristic and not the adverse publicity, the work of reformers or other political pressures. For convictions for serious crimes three modes of proof were operative. Complete proof was achieved on the eye-witness account of two witnesses. If there were not two eye-witnesses, the court could convict only upon the basis of a confession. Circumstantial evidence, no matter how compelling could never be used to secure a conviction. In the absence of two eyewitnesses or a voluntary confession, the court could call on the assistance of the torturer to help produce a confession. The accused could be said to be a slave to truth in these proceedings. But note that torture could only be used when there was at least a threshold of evidence, called half-proof against the suspect. Half-proof requirements could be met by one eye-witness, or circumstantial evidence of sufficient though cumulative weight determined by strict rules. Indeed Langbein is determined to make us see the logic and restraint that regulated these veridical inquisitions. 'To the extent that the explanation is to be found in logic, it is that the system did not allow indiscriminate coercion. The coercion was carefully limited (Langbein 1976:5). In explaining the shift from the ordeal or 'non-rational' proofs as he calls them, Langbein reminds us that God's truth was to be replaced by that of men in the shape of judges. The problem that this posed for the authority of the Church and the emerging city-states was to be solved by the judicial system of statutory proofs, strict rules requiring certainty and leaving no doubt as to the truth of its findings. In Langbein's off hand rationale for the introduction of torture we find: No society will tolerate a legal system in which there is no prospect of convicting unrepentant persons who commit clandestine crimes. Something had to be done to extend the system to those cases. The two-eye witness rule was hard to compromise or evade, but the confession rule invited 'subterfuge'. To go from accepting a voluntary confession to coercing a confession from someone against whom there was already strong suspicion was a relatively small step, indeed, one which was probably taken almost from the inception of the system (Langbein 1976:7).
Once again we note a re-inscription into the judicial process of pain and truth. The verdict of God, replaced by the confessional truth hidden in the body of the accused and to be drawn out in his or her screamed admissions. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of Langbein's work. We just pause to note his thesis that the Roman-canon law of proof lost its force not in the nineteenth century but in the seventeenth. Langbein claims that' a new system of proof, which was in fact free judicial evaluation of the evidence
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although not described as such, was developed in the legal science and the legal practice of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and confirmed in the legislation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This new system of proof developed alongside the Roman-canon system' (Langbein 1976:11). Finally we quickly note with Langbein, the English use of jury trial to replace the ordeal. Though the veridical practice over time changed from being active witnesses of the issues in dispute, to passive listeners to be persuaded of the truth in the case as presented by amateur prosecutors and factgatherers. It was this amateurism which according to Langbein, prevented the centralised and institutionalised use of inquisitorial torture in English judicial proceedings. While torture was used for certain serious investigations by the monarch and the Privy Council, it never became entrenched. We must turn a blind eye to peine forte et dure to press the accused into pleading and accepting trial by peers. Again we must note Langbein's insistence on the distinction between torture as part of a punishment, part of the preliminaryplea, and used to extractinformationand confessions. In this light, peine forte 'can best be regarded as a special kind of guilty plea. The defendant underwent a different mode of capital punishment to save his estate for his kin' (Langbein 1976:76). To conclude the English did not develop a professional prosecutorial bureaucracy as did their continental neighbours, and so they did not develop inquisitorial methods. This does not mean that torture was not used around judicial proceedings, just that the jury standard of proof 'made it unnecessary to provide extensive and refined evidence gathering. An English jury could still convict on less evidence than was required as a precondition for investigation under torture on the Continent' (Langbein 1976:139). In stark contrast to Langbein's legal history of the use of torture in judicial truth practices is Foucault's work on discourse analysis in general and truth practices in particular. With Foucault we note that the same Lateran Council of 1215 that forbade the ordeal as a truth ritual also codified the sacrament of penance. All at once the Christian was obliged to annually at least, kneel down and to tell his or her truth. Truth of the soul is now to be found in the magical conjunction between thoughts and words, examination, interrogation, and most importantly ritualised and sacramental articulation. The edict of the Lateran Council gave birth to the penitential subject, born in the rituals of power/knowledge/truth. To confess was to be free of sin, of the promise of torment, to be forgiven, to be redeemed to be born anew as a penitent, and forgiven, if fallen subject. Note the shift from the importance of the testimony of others, witnesses as to character, integrity, service to the community, status, birth and so on. In his History of Sexuality, Voume 1: An Introduction, Foucault notes that after the Middle Ages the confession became one of the main rituals for the production of truth: In any case, next to the testing rituals, next to the testimony of witnesses, and
the learned methods of observation and demonstration, the confession became one ofthe West's most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have since become a singularly confessing society. The confession has
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j'oucau{t: 'IFte Legacy spread its effects far and wide.lt plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites, on confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts, one's desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one's parents, one's educators, one's doctor, to those one loves, one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain things it would be impossible to tell anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses - or is forced to confess. When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat; it is driven from its hiding place in the soul, or extracted from the body. Since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied it like a shadow, and supported it when it could go no further; the dark twins. The most defenceless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal' (HS:59).
But more than this: in confession the soul, consciousness, self, call it what you will, is freed from the power that prohibits, represses, oppresses, silences. In the confessional voice, one finds oneself, frees oneself. Foucault argues that 'traditional themes in philosophy, which a "political history of truth" would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature freenor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this' (HS:59-60). In the ritual of confession whether it be to a priest, doctor, teacher, policeman, judge, lover, or even to oneself, there is always present the figure of an authority that demands this articulation in 'order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile, a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated, and finally a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it' (HS:62). Discipline and Punish is Foucault's detailed study of the history of 'the modern soul' and what he terms the present' scientifico-legal complex' from which the power to punish derives its justification. He claims that in the eighteenth century the techniques of discipline and examination were invented: The investigation was the sovereign power arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth by a number of regulated techniques. Now, although the investigation has since then been an integral part of Western justice (even up to our own day), one must not forget either its political origins, its links with the birth of the states and of monarchical sovereignty, or its later extension and its role in the formation of knowledge. In fact, the investigation has been the no doubt crude, but fundamental element in the constitution of the empirical sciences; it has been the juridico-political matrix of this experimental knowledge, which as we know was very rapidly released at the end of the Middle Ages (DP:225).
Foucault attributes the great developments in the empirical sciences to inquisitorial techniques. 'But what this politico-juridical, administrative and criminal, religious and lay, investigation was to the sciences of nature, disciplinary analysis has been to the sciences of man' For Foucault, the birth of the human sciences such as psychology, criminology, and pedagogy had
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their origin in the borrowing of the judicial techniques and rituals of truth, the disciplines in the form of the confession/ examination the philosopher I expert knower appro-priating translating interpreting and hence through the power I knowledge so created constructing the normal and the true self as well as of course the deviant/ criminal self truth. He argues that the disciplines have invaded penal justice that is still in principle inquisitorial. He notes the concern with corrections, rehabilitation, therapy, and the concern with normalisation and the dangerousness of the criminal, the measurement, prediction, a multiplication of judgements and little trials, all these betray 'the penetration of the disciplinary examination into the judicial inquisition' (DP:227). Foucault claims that: What is now imposed on penal justice at its point of application its 'useful' object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The extreme point of penal justice under the Ancient Regime was the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgment that at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time a permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptomatic movement that strives to meet infinity. The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under 'observation' is a natural extension of a justice imbued with the disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modem instrument of penality. Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? (DP:228).
We should read Foucault perhaps as striving towards another narrative of truth and subjectivity, not another dominant narrative of sacrifice and subjection, but a proliferation and polyphony of voices, voices always about to break the silence ....
Bibliography Bartlett, R. (1986). Trial by Fire and Water, The Medieval Judicial Ordeal, Clarendon Press. DuBois, Page (1991). Torture and Truth, Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1984). 'Truth and Subjectivity'. Berkeley: The Howison Lectures (unpublished Centre Michel Foucault. Paris). __ _, (1977). Discipline and Punish, Penguin (abbreviated as DP). __ _,(1978). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Penguin (abbreviated asHS). Langbein, J. (1976). Torture and the Law of Proof University of Chicago Press. Peters, E. (1985). Torture, Blackwells.
The Production of Truth: Body and Soul Part 2: Displaying the Truth of the Body
The truth of the human body was inseparable, in Graeco-Roman antiquity, from the truth about the natural world as a whole - the former was the microcosm which faithfully reflected the macrocosm of the latter. Where these two orders of being were understood in teleological terms, they communicated their meaning to the intellect of the observer through their normal functioning. Like the testimony of the free man in the Greek court, given without constraint, the testimony of nature unconstrained was a privileged source of truth. Thus it was rare to find an interest in the dissection of the human body or in the regular use of experimentation in the study of nature. From the teleological point of view, experimentation in the natural world was the equivalent of the judicial torture of slaves in the social world. Plato, for example, ridiculed the Pythagoreans who conducted experiments relating string lengths to musical tones, by describing them as men 'who persecute and torture [basanizontas 1the strings, racking them upon the pegs' while making accusations against them and dealing them blows with the plectrum (Plato 1965:531B). To this study of audible harmonies produced in the material world Plato contrasted the philosopher's understanding of the intelligible harmonies of pure numerical relationships (Plato 1965:531 C). As in Aristotle's more explicit comparison of matter and form with slave and master, here the material strings are slave-like and thus able to be subjected to torture. But if the intelligible world is the teleological expression of reason which matter only imperfectly reflects or embodies, then it is ludicrous to torture slavish matter for information when the intelligible forms themselves speak directly to human reason. In the courts, where rational men can sometimes use their reason to deceive, the corroborating evidence given by slaves under torture may be seen as a necessary corrective; but in nature, where cosmic reason operates without deception, the evidence of tortured matter is a hindrance to the attainment of truth. In the microcosm of the human body anatomical dissection was associated, in the first instance, with the anti-teleological views of the founders of Alexandrian medicine, the philosophical sceptic Herophilus and the Epicurean atomist Erasistratus. These two physicians were believed, in antiquity, not only to have dissected cadavers but also to have vivisected criminals sentenced to death (Celsus 1971:23). Here the torture of criminals in the interest of medical truth provides a literal parallel with the torture of slaves in the interest of juridical truth. And just as in the courts the evidence produced under torture was sometimes criticised as being an artefact of the torture itself rather than the expression of a hidden truth (DuBois 1991:56), so too in thecaseofhuman vivisection it was argued that'when the body had
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been laid open, colour, smoothness, softness, hardness and all similars would not be such as they were when the body was untouched' (Celsus 1971:41). This objection rested on a teleological view of the human body which may be summed up in the Hippocratic phrase, the healing power of nature. On this view the body mobilises its defences in response to illness and injury, and in doing so enters a qualitatively different state from the normal until health is restored. In the event of death it is transformed even further, for when the body 'is no longer a living creature ... none of its parts remains the same, except only in shape' (Aristotle 1961:641A). A rational grasp of the truth of the body must, on this account, come from observation of the living human's natural functioning, combined with limited therapeutic interventions to assist the healing tendencies already present within the body itself. The physician would learn the truth of the body by apprenticing himself to it rather than by inquiring into it- the human body was thus not the slave who needed to be tortured for information, but the free citizen who ideally spoke the truth without constraint. And yet even for the teleological view, the pure utterance of the human body might need corroboration after all, not because of deficiencies in the rational order of nature but because of the difficulty which human reason has in comprehending the unseen. '[T]he inner parts of man are to a very great extent unknown' (Aristotle 1910:494B). The remedy for this difficulty is to subject animals to dissection and vivisection, so that the truth of the human body can be discovered by'an examination of the inner parts of other animals whosenatureinanywayresembles that of man' (Aristotle 1910:494B). Thus, paradoxically, the information drawn from this violence wrought upon animals, although in principle inferior like the testimony of slaves under torture, in practice is often more trustworthy than the free expression of the unconstrained human body. With the revival of interest in anatomical study in the Renaissance, the tension between the desire to see into the living body and the caution against producing an artefact of torture or death was resolved in fantasy. A substantial number of early anatomical illustrations depict ambiguous human figures that appear to be both alive and dissected- and often they are not just dissected but seem to be dissecting themselves (for example, Laqueur, 1990:77-9). These figures suggest, in the first place, that there is no difference between life and death, so far as the data of anatomy are concerned; and secondly, that the exposure of the hidden truth of their viscera comes from a willing act of self revelation rather than an assault by the anatomist. There is no torture in these pictures and no death, only a series of voluntary confessions. That this confession entails pain and sacrifice is demonstrated by the ripped flesh of the anatomical figures; but their calm demeanour indicates that, just as in the ideal of penitential practice, the voluntary sacrifice of confession is followed by a sense of peace. These kinds of illustration provide a counterpoint to the more conventional pictures of the dissection scene, with the supine cadaver surrounded by the anatomist and a crowd of onlookers. In doing so they proclaim a confessional view of anatomical truth which sets it beyond the possibility of artefactual distortion
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(cf. Laqueur 1990:75). But they do not replace the other more 'realistic' illustrations which valorise both the work of science and the agency of the individual scientist in the production of truth. There is a similarly-opposed pair of representations which depict incompatible views of the relationship between experimental science and nature. In all these illustrations nature is portrayed as a nude but partially veiled female figure. In some cases another female figure, variously identified as Science or Reason, is removing the veil of nature (for example, on the obverse of the Nobel Prize medal); but in other cases nature is removing her own veil -not in isolation but in order to display herself to science (for example, Merchant 1980:191). Inthefirstsetofrepresentations,wherescienceremovestheveilofnature, we have an attenuated version of a much more forceful relationship described by experimentalists from the time of Galileo to the end of the nineteenth century. These scientists speak of nature being placed on triat interrogated and forced to answer. 'Nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art than when left to herself' (Bacon 1863, De Dignitate: Bk. 2, Ch. 2); there must be an 'inquisition of things' to discover nature's secrets (Bacon 1863, The New Organon:Preface); 'matters of fact ought to be brought to trial' and the 'testimony of nature' obtained (Boyle1965:744, 724); 'In experimenting we place her [Nature] in the witness-box, cross-examine her, and extract from her the knowledge in excess of that which would, or could, be spontaneously given' (Tyndal11898:213). Nature, like the strings in Plato's story of the Pythagorean musical experimenters, is to be persecuted and tortured by experimental science. Galileo, another one who speaks of placing nature under compulsion, is the first to introduce systematic experimentation into physics; and he does so, appropriately enough, using as his model the musical experiments of his father, Vincenzo Galilei, on the sounds of plucked strings (Drake 1970). But these 'vexations of art' are transformed in the visual images into a gentle disrobing of nature, either by the hand of a solicitous female companion or by nature herself. As in the case of the equivalent anatomical illustrations, the active self-disclosure of nature, with science as a passive witness, attests to the non-artefactual authenticity of the revelation- especially given the longstanding convention in Western iconography equating female nudity with truth. On the other hand, depictions of the active removal of nature's veil by science, with nature as a passive recipient of attention, reinforce the value of scientists' work while placing science in the position of servant or handmaiden of nature. In neither version of this unveiling, this disclosure, is there any suggestion of compulsion. The truths of nature must be willingly confessed if they are to have the warrant of authenticity. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the epistemic status of the cadaver began to undergo a fundamental change in medicine. Before this time the corpse was a denatured object which could express only a limited and distorted version of the body's truth. Death compromised knowledge of the body to such an extent that one genre of anatomical illustration tended, as we have seen, to negate the death of the dissected specimen. But
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with the development of pathological anatomy around the time of the French Revolution the focus of investigation changed so that death, rather than being an obstacle to knowledge about the body, became its most informative feature (Foucault 1972:Chs 8-9.). Expansion of the hospital system and routine autopsy of every patient who died, made it possible to keep an enormous number of diseased bodies under continual surveillance, both before and after death. The aim of the post-mortem examination was to correlate the course of the patient's fatal illness with the anatomical lesions found after death. Pathological changes in the body's tissues were identified with specific diseases and thus replaced symptoms as the organising principle of medicine - the symptom complex of coughing, fever and wasting, for example, was no longer the disease 'consumption'; it was merely an outward manifestation of an inner truth which could only be read deep in the body's tissues, and which might be tuberculosis, or pneumonia, or even a heart disease, according to the nature of the lesion found there. This conceptual reorganisation of medicine made the dead body a more truthful spokesperson for disease than the living patient. For it was now possible not only to have symptoms without diseases (ie. malingering) but also diseases without symptoms: 'In the cadaver one frequently finds traces of inflammation, of which one had not perceived any trace and which had not in fact presented any sign during life' (Corvisart 1929:CCCIV). The subjective consciousness of the patient must therefore be supplanted by the search for objective signs of disease in the patient's body- signs which would allow the physician to detect lesions 'by means of the subtlest perception of the slightest derangement of the injured organ's functions' (Corvisart 1818:367). From this time forward medicine will substitute the active diagnostic examination for its older reliance on the patient's reported experience of well-being or illness. Previously, the standard of health was something unique for each person, because no two bodily constitutions were identical: 'there does not exist a state of health which can be appropriate for everyone; each person has their own manner of well-being, because this state ... is specific to each individual' (d' Aumont 1765). Now, however, medicine will regard health as a normative ideal which is virtually unattainable. Lesions are so universally found at autopsy that every constitution must be defective, and it becomes the task of scientific medicine to specify for each human body precisely how it falls short of the ideal of health and thus bears death within itself. 'It is when death is epistemologically integrated into medical experience that disease could ... become embodied in the living bodies of individuals .... [F]rom the positioning of death within medical thought is born a medicine which presents itself as a science of the individual' (Foucault 1972:200-1). The autopsy table shows that every constitution tends toward disease and thus requires constant medical surveillance. Active diagnostic examination of the apparently healthy body must discover those formative diseases of which the patient is unaware. The pain and sacrifice characteristic of the penitential confession are present in the 'cries of the suffering organs' (Broussais 1816:Preface), whether the patient hears them or not. So the body must be subjected to a medical examination which will allow it to
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confess its pathological secrets to the physician, even while concealing them from the patient. The unlimited self-revelation of the body that was merely a fantasy in earlier anatomical illustrations, is now a permanent feature of the clinical examination. As the confessional subject has arisen in the modern era, so too has the confessional body- both to a great extent the products of similar techniques of surveillance, examination and normalisation.
Bibliography Aristotle (1910). History of Animals, translated by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, in Works of Aristotle, J.A. Smith and W.D. Ross, (eds), vol. IV. Clarendon Press. __ _, (1961 ). On the Parts ofAnimals, Loeb Classical Library, Greek text with an English translation by A.L. Peck, Heinemann. Bacon, Francis (1863). De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum and The New Organon, in James Spedding et al. (eds), The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. VIII, Riverside. Boyle, Robert (1965). 'Hydrostatical Paradoxes', in Thomas Birch (ed.), The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, Vol. II, Georg Olms. Broussais, Fran<;ois-Joseph-Victor (1816). Examen de la doctrine medicale generalement adoptee, et des systemes modernes de nosologie. Mequignon-Marvis. Celsus, Aulus Cornelius (1971). De Medicina, Loeb Classical Library, Latin text with an English translation by W.G. Spencer, Heinemann. Corvisart, Jean-Noel (1929). Aphorismes de medecine clinique, Masson. __ _, (1818). Essai sur les maladies et les lesions organiques du coeur et des gros vaisseaux, Mequignon-Marvis. D' Aumont, Arnulfe (1765). 'Sante,' in Denis Diderot and Jean LeRond d'Alembert (eds), Encyclopedic, ou dictionnaire raisonee des sciences, des arts et des metiers, tome XIV, Faulche. Drake, Stillman (1970). 'Renaissance Music and Experimental Science'. Journal of the History of Ideas, 31:483-500. DuBois, Page (1991). Torture and Truth, Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1972). Naissance de la clinique, Presses Universitaires de France. Laqueur, Thomas (1990). Making Sex, Harvard University Press. Merchant, Carolyn (1980). The Death of Nature, Harper and Row. Plato (1965). The Republic of Plato, Greek text edited by James Adam, with translation of selected passages in the editor's critical notes, Cambridge. Tyndall, John (1898). New Fragments, Appleton.
Legal Language As Discursive Formation Cliristine !J6eains Foucault's work has focussed to a considerable degree on the functioning of power- on the strategies and practices through which power is exercised at micro and macro levels in society. Examination of the juridical, disciplinary operations of power has been given particular emphasis in his work as have more specifically, 'the techniques and tactics of domination' (Foucault 1980:102). My paper, situated within critical legal theory which focuses on what Foucault calls 'the conditions of possibility of legal texts', will analyse one type of legal text- spoken utterances in court hearings. As the vast body of legal texts exists in written not oral form, the study of spoken legal discourse has received less critical attention than it warrants. Legal documents and utterances, in common with other texts, may have their textual and discursive features mapped or deconstructed using a variety of methodologies and procedures. I intend to employ critical linguistic modes of analysis to demonstrate that such spoken discourse forms are instruments of social regulation and discipline. Legal discourse, I will argue, is a language of power exercised through control over meaning as a strategy of domination at both the micro level (in specific legal situations), and the macro level, as an order of discourse. As Sandra Harris argues:' concepts such as "justice", "equality before the law", "impartiality of judgement", "legal rights and obligations" are fundamental not only to the effective working of the legal system but to the perception and maintenance of Western political democracy as we know and experience it' (1990:2). These are highly sensitive ideological concepts whose validity can be put to the test by an examination of the linguistic interactions that occur in court hearings. Power and discipline become 'visible' in these interactions. I thus begin with the proposition that power is increasingly exercised through the ideological operations of language. Social theorists such as Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas and Pecheux have constantly stressed the importance of language as a form of social practice, as discourse, and have illustrated some of the ways in which language operates as an instrument of power in the domination of some groups by others. As Bourdieu states, 'one seeks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished' (1977:184). Foucault (1980) usefully reminds us that power is omnipresent, not just because it is intimately involved in all human action but because it is constantly being produced. Power informs not only the act of speaking, since speaking is a form of action, but also the meaning of what is said, and, in any society, some groups or individuals, usually representatives of powerful institutions such as the law, the Church or government, have more ability to have their meanings accepted, adopted or acted upon than do others less powerful. This is clearly evident even from the fact that
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certain linguistic registers exist to represent and preserve the special status and knowledge of particular groups or institutions -legal, medical, legislative and so on - and, as a consequence, devalue and exclude non-participants. AB Thompson suggests, 'it is the infusion of meaning with power that lends language so fully to the operations of ideology' (1984:132). One could argue at length about the various definitions of ideology and their applicability to social practice or language study. I intend to use the term to mean a systematically organised presentation of reality, which includes political philosophies, science, metaphysics and other bodies of knowledge which are organised from a particular standpoint. In addition to ensuring the cohesion of the social order, ideology serves to maintain the relationships of power and domination within the social order. Ideology operates, as Thompson points out: Not so much as a coherent system of statements imposed on a population from above, but rather through a complex series of mechanisms whereby meaning is mobilised, in the discursive practices of everyday life; for the maintenance of relations of domination (1984:63).
Thus, to study ideology at work, one cannot avoid examining the ways meaning or signification works to sustain unequal relationships of power. There is a close affinity between institutional or social practices and their characteristic forms of discourse. PE:kheux, in fact, defines the discursive formation in terms of its institutional form as that which determines 'what can and should be said - in the form of a speech, a sermon, a pamphlet, a programme' (1982:65) and to this, of course, one might add a claim, a plea or a judgement. This focuses attention on the social origins and authority of a discourse. Foucault speaks of 'enunciative modalities' in this context and asks: Who is speaking? Who, among the totality of speaking individuals, is accorded the right to use this sort oflanguage? Who is qualified to do so? Who derives from it his own special quality, his prestige, and from whom, in return, does he receive if not the assurance, at least the presumption that what he says is true? What is the status of the individuals who- alone- have the right, sanctioned by law or tradition, juridically defined or spontaneously accepted, to proffer such a discourse? (1980:241).
He suggests here that the site from which the authorised subject speaks is the site from which the discourse derives its 'legitimate source' and 'point of application'. The institution from which the discourse derives also points to the situation of its reception- courts of law, school rooms, pulpits and so on. The exclusivity, distance and reification that characterise legal discourse could be seen as covert strategies to discourage opposition to the authority of legal meaning. Not only does legal language employ an authoritative specialist register 'whose lexicon and syntax reflect the historical influence of two alien and one obsolete specifically legal dialects' (Goodrich 1990: 185), but in the instances I am examining, it employs it in formally arranged, hierarchically ordered, alienating institutional spaces- courtrooms. Any intradiscourse defines the limits of its operations and establishes rules and procedures for its conduct. It also appropriates and privileges selected
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terminologies, lexical and semantic forms, which result in a relatively selfcontained exclusive system of meaning. Nevertheless, and paradoxically, meanings emanating from such institutional discourses are never totally self-contained or self-referential. They always contain other broader social meanings and inter-relationships with other discursive formations in the hierarchy. Language, as Bahktin reminds us, predates any specific usage and is always overlaid with earlier usages or utterances. Legal language is in every sense, that of the 'already written'; the product of convention, its usages regulated and defined by custom and precedent, dependent upon a complex network of citation and reference. As Lenoble and Ost point out:'legality would be nothing if it were not supported by a network of institutions, a tradition of ideas which always encloses and delineates the domain within which legal discourse can exercise its textual powers' (in Goodrich 1984:530). Goodrich sums it up thus: 'the legal tradition has thus instituted an order of lawful discourse and prohibits those heterodoxies of speech or writing that are deemed to threaten the security oflegal meaning or the order oflegal and political reason' (Goodrich 1990:7). ThissupportsFoucault'scontention that institutions over a long period of time develop and sanction a series of rules for discourse control- rules of exclusion, of limitation and rules governing the conditions of use of specific discourse forms. The intradiscursive forms I have chosen are samples of court room interaction drawn from civil and criminal cases in Queensland. The court room like the school room is an unusual discursive site, because so much of its verbal interaction is restricted to two speech acts- question and answer. In both these sites, the active role, that of questioner is assigned to the institutional representative, and the normal rules of conversational turn taking do not apply as witnesses soon find out if they try to appropriate the role themselves: Witness: Can I just say one thing? Counsel: By all means. Witness: Right. Why, when I came back to the jail, why did I go back to the boys' yard and then back in the main-stream? Answer me that. Counsel: Mr Curtis, unfortunately, in the law the rules are that I ask the questions here.
One of the conventions of courtroom discourse is the strictly controlled order and tone of speech, where respondents cannot speak unless called upon to do so and cannot interject or interrupt without risking disciplinary action. This example well illustrates Foucault's rules of exclusion- of what is not permissible to be said. The rules of evidence set out the various participant roles in court room interactions, as well as the forms of address and reply that are appropriate. It is through the selection of various question types that counsel can not only direct the flow of evidence, but also carry out meta-evaluations of it, and finally shape it into a plausible, thematically coherent story for the benefit of the jury. Much of the spoken language of the court is designed to impact upon the non-speaking participants in the case, the members of the jury.
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While they do not verbally interact with the other participants, their very presence and role significantly influence the function and direction of the interactions that do take place. Foucault's disciplinary rule of limitation applies here particularly because a proposition is not admissible as evidence unless it falls 'within the true'. Indeed, as Bernard Jackson points out, the Law of Evidence is based on the presupposition that 'truth' is simply waiting to be discovered; that it is accessible (but mediated) by the competing narratives of advocates. This suggests that in law, 'truth' is an unproblematic concept, while linguists (and proponents of critical legal studies) argue that 'truth' in the courtroom is but a construction (or reconstruction) developed from witness testimony which is elicited according to certain fixed conventions and predetermined goals, and validated as 'truth' within this particular social context - the court-room. Questions are speech acts, and mean both as actions and semantically as propositions encoded in the interrogative form. Broadly, questions fall into two main groups- YES/NO questions and 'WH' questions (that is, 'what', 'why', 'which', 'who' type questions). YES/NO questions are obviously very restrictive and are regarded as closed questions. In such questions the truth of the proposition embedded in them is dependent upon the reply. Thus YES /NO answers from respondents transform such questions into evidence. From my investigation, they appear to be much used in cross examination as the following extract indicates:
Cross Examination of Plaintiff by Defence Counsel DC
I put it to you that Mr Smith never came up to you and escorted you to the shower cubicle?
P.
Hedid.
DC
And that nothing happened in the shower cubicle?
P.
It did.
DC
You say you are frightened?
P.
Yes,Iam.
DC
You are 6 foot 2?
P.
That's right.
DC
And the reason that you have a previous criminal conviction in relation to assault is that someone spread a rumour about; is that right?
P.
That's right.
DC
Who did that?
P.
A school student.
DC
He spread a rumour about you?
P.
Yes.
DC
And you assaulted him, did you?
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P.
Yes.
DC
When did that occur?
P.
April.
DC
On the 2 July of last year, 1990, you were involved in an incident at school, were you?
P.
Beg pardon?
DC
Were you involved in an incident at the school grounds?
P.
That's correct.
DC
You were charged with assault occasioning bodily harm?
P.
That's correct.
DC
Being unlawfully on school premises?
P.
That's correct.
DC
And insulting and abusing a teacher at an education institution?
P.
That's correct.
DC
Did you plead guilty or were you found guilty?
P.
I pleaded guilty.
DC
And you got six months probation, is that right?
P.
Six months imprisonment.
DC
And it was a situation of assault. Was it a heated situation?
P.
Yes.
DC
Is that the matter concerning your girlfriend?
P.
Yes.
DC
Then in October of this year you were convicted of two unlawful assaults?
P.
That's correct.
DC
And you were sentenced to imprisonment?
P.
That's correct.
DC
Then in June of this year, you were convicted of being unlawfully found in an enclosed yard?
P.
That's correct.
DC
And yet you say that you were too scared to do anything in relation to these two people?
P.
Well, like I told you before, its unfair for six or seven against one.
DC
But not six or seven are charged. You haven't made any complaints against six or seven.
P.
I know, because they didn't do anything.
DC
You have only made a complaint against two?
P.
That's right.
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Now, Mr. Smith, you said did all these things to you.
P.
That's right.
DC
I put to you he didn't. You say- just so that I understand your evidence fully - that you are too scared to have done anything, even to have fought or to manoeuvre yourself out of the situation that may have developed, is that right?
P.
That's correct.
DC
And yet society has given you a number of chances in relation to controlling your temper outside, just in general society, hasn't it?
P.
Yes.
Here is a lengthy series of virtually all YES /NO questions which forms part of a much longer series in the cross-examination of the plaintiff in a jail rape case that effectively illustrate my contention that considerable power lies in the hands of the questioner. Their aim is to challenge the plaintiff's claim that he was forced by two inmates to carry out various homosexual acts in a jail shower cubicle, and that he was too intimidated to attempt to ward off his attackers by physical means. They are very specific, closed questions, that the witness must answer in a very specific way. They all point to his size, '6 foot 2', and his existing (and recent) record for assault causing bodily harm. These are nicely juxtaposed against the thrice repeated question 'you say you are frightened?' (or 'too scared ... ') which clearly aims to cast doubt on the story. Even the choice of words 'you say you are too scared' could be a checking or confirmatory question, or, depending upon the pattern of emphasis, could also be a further way of casting doubt on the story. The questioner also has the right (always denied the respondent) to summarise responses and evaluate them for his /her own purposes. This can be seen when the cross-examiner says, 'And yet society has given you a number of chances in relation to controlling your temper outside, just in general society, hasn't it?' Here an interpretation or meta-evaluation is assigned to what the plaintiff has said which goes well beyond what he actually has said. Such reformulations are often quite tangential to or in virtual contradiction of what has actually been said by a witness, but once made by the questioner are then accepted as ratified. Declarative questions such as 'you were involved in an incident at school, were you?' contain a proposition (or presupposition from the questioner) embedded in the interrogative structure, and the tag, 'were you?' invites confirmation of it. These are often used, I find, for accusations which are framed as questions for information which thus makes it difficult for a witness to challenge them. A direct accusation would perhaps be met with a straight negative. Negative YES/NO questions indicate doubt or surprise about a response as occurs in the following: Cross Examiner:
You didn't mention a kangaroo at all?
Witness:
Not at all.
CE.
I put it to you that you did?
w.
I deny that.
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CE.
You didn't give him a history as to how the accident happened?
w.
Yesldid.
While new information according to evidentiary rules must come from witnesses, YES /NO questions are frequently used by barristers to introduce a new topic, as occurs below.
Theft of car parts case E.
Gail Stead had three children at that time and a fourth on the way?
W.
Yes.
E.
She was not working?
W.
No.
E.
She was in need of money?
W.
Yes.
E.
She spoke to you about her money worries?
W.
Yes.
E.
You were doing bar work yourself?
W.
Yes.
E.
It doesn't pay very well?
W.
No, not really.
E.
And when you have got a young child, they tend to eat up the money, don't they?
W.
Yes, it does.
E.
Clothes, food, child sitting ...
W.
That's right.
E.
And there are nice things you'd like to buy your child as well?
W.
Well, we just did without.
E.
So you had money worries at that time, didn't you?
W.
Yes, that's right.
E.
And even when you're not working, the Supporting Parents' Benefit is not very much either, is it?
W.
No, it's not.
E.
So it would be fair to say in that period of time both you and Gail were in a fairly desperate financial situation?
W.
Not desperate, but it was always very tight.
E.
It is very hard to enjoy those little luxuries, isn't it?
W.
Yes, it is.
E.
And the thing with mothers, they tend to go without themselves, but they hate to see their children go without, don't they?
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w.
Yes, that's right.
E.
It often gives parents a great deal of pleasure just to buy those little
things to put a smile on a child's face?
w.
Yes.
E.
Gail Stead, did she ever talk to you about her husband's business?
w.
No, not really; it was not something- Gail and I were really close friends. Her husband - I didn't particularly like him. He was somebody that I sort of put up with. I wasn't really close to him at all.
E.
But did Gail talk to you about her husband's business?
w.
No, not really, not in great detail. We talked about it maybe generally, but I couldn't pinpoint a conversation.
E.
Did Gail ever say to you that she was really short of money and she was going to sell some of those parts in the shed?
w.
Yes, she did.
E.
Because there were quite a lot of parts in the shed, wasn't there?
W.
Yeah, there were quite a few.
Earlier questioning in the cross-examination of this witness has concentrated on her knowledge of the existence of a large quantity of spare motor parts in a shed belonging to the husband of a friend of hers. At this point, the focus of the questions changes dramatically to the new issue of money and financial concerns. Having established at the outside by means of the YES I NO questions that both the women are in fairly straightened financial circumstances, the direction of questions seems to change again. The witness would find it hard not to agree with the latter propositions put to her which are cast in the form of broad generalisations about parents' desires to do as much as they can for their children. These questions are part of a funnelling action where a series of general questions are followed by more specific one(s) and finally by even more specific ones as occurs at the end of this extract where the cross-examiner moves from the series of tag questions dealing generally with parents and children to the twice repeated question 'Did Gail Stead talk to you about her husband's business?' and then the final crucial question: 'Did Gail every say to you that she was really short of money and she was going to sell some of those parts in the shed?' This may be a way of shaping and focussing the evidence upon an incriminating point. It is also a means of presenting a plausible scenario to the jury which provides motivation for the removal of the spare parts before an accusation is made. 'WH' questions, while less constraining than the YES /NO variety, still require an answer specific in respect of that question. Broader 'WH' questions such as 'What happened then?' allow a further narrative explanation and are used to develop a story, to provide the authenticity of an 'own words' account. They are used in direct examination when trying to elicit new information from witnesses, especially in the introductory sections of an examination, as the extract below illustrates.
Legal Language .9ls 'Discursive !formation
369
Examination of witness in attempted murder case. E.
Do you recall Wednesday, 6 March, Mr. Johns coming to your house?
W.
Yes.
E.
What occurred on that day?
W.
Well, he came, and my husband ordered him off, because Dawn had come home to us.
E.
Over the next few weeks, did you see him again?
W.
On and off up the street.
E.
Going to the weekend of 20-21 April, who was staying at your house?
W.
My granddaughter, Leanne.
E.
And who else?
E.
The entire family.
E.
Leanne is a student at college in Toowoomba, isn't she?
W.
Yes.
E.
And she left for Toowoomba on the Sunday morning- about what time was that, do you recall?
W.
About half past eight.
E.
What happened then?
W.
Leanne spoke to her father in the street for a few minutes and then left.
E.
Where was he exactly at that time?
W.
Standing adjacent to the property at the back.
E.
What did you do for the balance of the day?
Tag questions (which have occurred quite frequently in the extract already discussed) are really declarative questions followed by the tag- 'doesn't it', 'isn't it', 'am I right', 'do you agree' and so on. They contain a proposition that the tag invites acceptance or denial of, and are much used to confirm the speaker's belief and to emphasise it for the jury. This is evident in the following short extract from the cross-examination of a witness in a damages case.
Cross-Examination in a Damages case. E.
His accidentwouldnothave happened if he had not left the power turned on to that machine, would it?
W.
No.
E.
So really the clutch is a minor consideration in things, is it not, Mr.Towson?
W.
It depends if you are going to clean the machine as Mr. McCarthy
did it.
j'oucau{t: 'IFte Legacy
370 E.
Yes, well, the real danger came about in his case because of his choice to clean the machine in the way he chose to clean it, did it not?
While this could not really be termed a coercive exchange, this is a key point in the defence case (namely, that the plaintiff's accident was caused by his own negligence); thus there is considerable pressure on the witness to assent to the truth of the propositions asserted by the questioner. While the witness is clearly constrained to answer in the way that he does, it is clear that he is reluctant to provide unqualified responses. He makes several attempts to provide further mitigating information which is apparently ignored by the questioner. To be dominant in a communicative exchange requires the control of a large part of the interaction space- the territory which is to be canvassed. The quantitative side - who has most words - is usually not the best guide to determine this. More significant is the issue of topic dominance - which topics are validated and introduced for discussion (and by whom) and who controls the methods and direction of their development. As Foucault reminds us discourse is 'a space of positions and of differentiated functions for subjects' (1978:13). It is the prerogative of the more powerful participants in a discourse to choose the linguistic strategies most appropriate to their purposes. However, this choice also positions all other participants in this specific discourse, and also in the order of discourse associated with the institutional site from which the discourse emanates. The instances I have examined indicate quite clearly, that the questioner is in control of the topic. He/she initiates the questions, comments on, paraphrases, reformulates, evaluates or interprets the responses at will, even though the respondent denies the propositions upon which these operations are based. The questioner is also the only one who can (or does) interrupt or back-track. He/ she also uses questions or directives to control the respondent's behaviour such as 'speak up', 'answer the question', 'you may stand down'. This person also defines when and if the witness is to speak, and when directed to do so, the witness must answer. Yet almost always the respondents tacitly acknowledge the power and status of the questioner and the court room context. There are few violations of turn taking, interruptions or challenges to the questioner from the respondents. Rarely are they allowed to speak at any length or tell their stories in their own words without direction or interruption from the questioner. Questions of relevance or admissibility are also decided for respondents and they play no part in the discursive pre-construction of the questions asked. There is also the commitment to telling the truth which is placed upon the respondent who faces possible perjury charges if he I she does not. These conventions of speech and action are further policed to make certain they are upheld, and penalties such as contempt of court exist if they are broken (here illustrating the disciplinary character of court discourse). Additional features such as lexical substitution and choice of register are also in the questioner's power. The court room is thus a very asymmetrical site linguistically, in terms of power, as I have indicated. The time honoured, routinised conventions of the court room hearing impose this particular interactional style upon
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witnesses which compels them to occupy the subordinate position in the discourse and to behave in certain constrained ways. Consciously or unconsciously then, legal discourse of this kind excludes genuine participation by members of the public in the legal process, which further casts doubt upon those concepts of 'justice' and 'equality before the law' that are enshrined in our political and legal systems. Court room speech as Goodrich notes is 'underpinned by many of the more general and manifest inequalities of relationship that exist as between legal discourse and non-legal discourses' (1990:194). Language is not only crucial to the exercise and maintenance of power and domination in institutional contexts such as this, but, as I noted earlier, all operations of power are ultimately based in broader social practices which are also primarily linguistic. Indeed, social control as Foucault acknowledges, increasingly functions through the ideological operation of language. Pecheux, in commenting on the hierarchy of discursive formations argues that: 'every discourse formation is dependent on "the complex whole in dominance" of discursive formations and is an, illustration of the ideological order of a society at an historical moment (1982:113). As an illustration of the 'ideological order' in our society, then, legal discourse of the kind I have been examining highlights this order's manifest inequalities and disciplinary character.
References Bourdieu P. (1985). Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bahktin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: Texas. Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things, London: Tavistock. __ _, (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock. __ _, (1978). 'The Politics and the Study of Discourse'. Ideology and Consciousness, 3:726. __ _, (1980). Power/Knowledge, C. Gordon, (ed.), Brighton: Harvester Press. Goodrich, P. (1984). 'The role of linguistics in legal analysis', Modern Law Review, 47:523-34. __ _, (1990). Languages of Law from Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Harris, S. (1989). 'Defendant resistance to power and control in court', in H. Coleman (ed. ), Working with Language. A Multidisciplinary Consideration ofLanguage Use in Work Contexts, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. __ _, (1990). 'Ideological Exchanges in British Magistrates Courts', in John Gibbons (ed.), Language and the Law, London: Longmans. Jackson, B. (1991). 'Narrative Models in Legal Proof', in D. Papke (ed. ), Narrative and Legal Discourse. A Reader in Story Telling and the Law, Liverpool: Deborah Charles Publications. Pecheux, M. (1982). Language, Semantics and Ideology: Stating the Obvious, trans. H. Nagpal, London: Macmillan. Thompson, J.B. (1984). Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Part Eight The Art of Government
'Liberalism' and Government: Political Philosophy and the Liberal Art of Rule
Michel Foucault's legacy is often rather carelessly assimilated to the loose composite picture of'contemporary French theory' which circulates throughout the Anglophone academy. In this conception Foucault's originality is still commonly seen as lying in the novelty of his intellectual interests and enthusiasms, and his oeuvre is depicted as the legacy of a kind of perpetual avant-gardism, forever 'subverting' the conventions of received intellectual opinion, disciplinary habitus and political fixity. Less well understood until recentlyhasbeenFoucault'spersistentengagementinarangeofoftenrather unfashionable departments on Western thought: the emergence of specific modern discourses of politics and government, and their relationship to the quite mundane practices and techniques of administrative and bureaucratic institutions quite alien to the totalitarian glamour of the Panopticon in his Discipline and Punish. At the core of the set of arguments which he assembled around the rubric of 'governmentality', for instance, is to be found Foucault's sketch of an understanding of Western liberalism since the eighteenth century, depicted as the defining art of rule of the modern representative-democratic West. It is now recognised that Foucault's work in the 'governmental' register is amongst the most fertile and important of his corpus, and that it has important implications for our understanding of the political present, as well as our political heritage. Yet the importance and plausibility of his work on liberalism has received only limited attention from scholars, primarily in the form of the now well-known set of essays published as The Foucault Effect (Burchell et al. 1991). Here I want to make some sympathetic but critical observations on Foucault's account of the genealogy of Western liberalism, paying particular attention to its relations both to recent empirical research in early modern political thought, and to the contemporary architecture of liberal political philosophy, particularly in its Rawlsian guise. I argue that Foucault's account is both a salutary rebuke to some of the preoccupations of contemporary liberal theory, and at the same time a seriously inadequate account of the contours of what could be described for simplicity's sake (if not entirely accurately) as 'early modern liberalism'. In his Resume des Cours for 1979, Foucault summarised the broad picture of liberalism which animated his speculations. He saw liberal thought and reflection 'neither as a theory nor as an ideology', but'as a practice ... as a way of doing which is directed towards goals and which regu