[analytic-borders] Foucault: An Aesthetic Life
ggos...@aol.com
This summary is based mostly on an article by Robert
Wicks about Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984), a French
historian. Wicks' article is uncritical but useful. Foucault had
a major impact on American English departments in the
late 20th century. He was influential in raising questions
about the historical character of the categories of social
experience. Foucault's life reflected an enthusiasm for
sadism that contributed to his early death from AIDS.
Much of what follows seems to fall into the categories of
art history and art criticism rather than aesthetics.
Foucault's interest in the arts has been overlooked for the
most part, according to Wicks. Studies have focused on
Foucault's sociological discussions of how tacit assumptions
about the nature of knowledge can determine a society's
modes of inquiry, its institutional structures, and its
conceptions of correct behavior. (Foucault is a structuralist
or poststructuralist in that he is looking for deep hidden
structures that determine surface events.) He sees cultures
in a perspectival manner adopted from Nietzsche. His views
depend on a belief that humans lack a universal nature.
(The belief that a mammal lacks a nature is, from the viewpoint
of biology, improbable.)
Wicks wrote that Foucault had an "interest in increasing
the possibilities for people to exercise a more artistic control
over their lives, for the purpose of creating for themselves
a more satisfying and healthy personal lifestyle." (This
is reminiscent of Nietzsche.)
LAS MENINAS
The first chapter of THE ORDER OF THINGS offers an analysis
of Diego Velazquez 's "Las Meninas." Foucault makes "a daring
claim: this painting's compositional structure displays
quintessentially the mode of representation that dominated
the thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. . . ."
Foucault calls this the Classical Age.
Foucault claims that, in the 1600s, a detached viewpoint
developed in Europe that led to attempts to map and order
things in an objective way. This in turn led to an aesthetic
that stressed that a disinterested attitude was needed for
an unbiased understanding of natural and artistic beauty.
The viewer attempts to omit herself from the scene. The
composition of "Las Meninas" exemplifies this idea by
containing only the twice-removed reflections of the people
who are the implied observers and implied subjects of
the painting, King Philip and Queen Mariana Teresa.
(This is a fascinating insight, although it seems to me
that establishing what the dominant cultural assumption of
an era was would require more than one example or
twenty examples: what constitutes a dominant assumption is
a matter of opinion, a simplification of a complexity that is
beyond calculation. What constitutes an era is a second matter
of opinion, a social construct.)
THIS IS NOT A PIPE
To represent the mentality of the 20th century in the
West, Foucault turns to Magritte's "This Is Not A Pipe," a
realistic painting of a tobacco pipe with "this is not a pipe"
written beneath it in French. According to Foucault, "two
principles have ruled Western painting from the fifteenth
to the end of the nineteenth century." (1) Words and
paintings were kept separate, and if they were used together,
one was subordinated to the other. (2) Paintings of objects
directed the observer's attention outside the painting to the
real object in the real world.
For Foucault "This Is Not A Pipe" controverts these two
assumptions. The painting is ambiguous and resists any
single interpretation, a key feature, Foucault says, of
twentieth century art. The composition generates an
oscillation between words and image, and no point of view
is given precedence.
Magritte's realistic portrait of a pipe is supposed to differ
from other realistic portraits of pipes in that it doesn't refer
to actual pipes. I was unable to determine why one realistic
portrait refers to something actual while another realistic
portrait does not.
Magritte was a surrealist. Wicks writes: "Foucault . . . appears
to see expressed artistically . . . the general view of meaning
which closely approximates that of the linguist, Ferdinand
de Saussure: the idea that the meaning of a word is
established primarily by the semantic network of associated
words within which it operates linguistically, as opposed to
the initially clear, unambiguous and independent reference
to some specifiable object in the world.
Note that Wicks claims that the meaning of word is established
_primarily_ by the semantic network. Unlike authors I've read
in Literary Theory, Wicks does not claim that the meaning of
a word is established _entirely_ by the semantic network.
It's unclear to me what Wicks, de Saussure or Foucault intend
by the term "meaning." As a Wittgensteinian, I take the
position that meaning is use.
In any case, that would leave things this way: that Magritte's
pipe does not refer to pipes in the world, or it might refer
but in a way that is initially unclear, ambiguous and
dependent. Foucault's analysis assumes that we have the
same reactions to the painting that Foucault had, which may
not be the case, as we learned in reading about expressivism.
HISTORY OF POSTMODERNISM
Foucault, a historian, is aware that the principles heralded
during the 1960s as postmodern or poststructuralist
were already in use during the 1920s. At least some of
the principles -- I don't recall if he makes this comparison --
were present in "Las Meninas," for example, "an aesthetic
that stressed that a disinterested attitude."
BORGES
For Foucault, the writings of Jorge Luis Borges embodied
the same principles as 'This Is Not A Pipe." In THE ORDER
OF THINGS, Foucault comments on the Borges short story
"The Analytic Language of John Wilkins," noting that the
story mentions a certain Chinese encyclopedia 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, (j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera,
(m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a
long way off look like flies."
Foucault noted that these fictional classifications cannot
be organized into a coherent scheme. They present a
multisided incongruity, which Foucault claimed as a
general principle of the twentieth century mentality: the
world invites characterization and understanding in a
multi-faceted way that can run contrary to logically grounded
and scientifically interested styles of classification.
It's interesting that Foucault made these observations at the
dawn of the age of digital computers.
(Two questions come to mind. The first is that the examples
that Wicks cites are taken from the arts -- how sure are we
that twenty examples from fiction and painting represent
the thinking of several billion people in the twentieth
century? Second, is it possible for people to discard logical
thought as a main grounding while remaining human?
The examples of postmodern nonfiction writing that I have
read have been, often, examples of logical thought.)
Foucault, according to Wicks, has a broad interest in drawing
our attention to the limits of any given perspective. The
experience of conceptual disorientation that Magritte or
Borges or Cubism can give us underscores the limitations
of logically structured thought and paves the way for a
more prismatic outlook.
ECSTATIC AWARENESS
"If the underlying principles that govern either a society or
a person are dissolved, then the stability and enduring
integrity of that society or person will be disrupted,"
Wicks writes. Such upheavals occurred, for Foucault, if not
for others, during the transition from the Renaissance to
the Classical period and from the Classical to the Modern
period. During such a period a person may become
disillusioned with her old assumptions and adopt new ones,
becoming a new person.
(Perhaps the reverse also happens, as in the case of those
who gave up modern values, became disillusioned with the
new assumptions, and adopted older values, becoming a new
but old person.)
Foucault believes that language strongly determines
the contours of human consciousness. He holds that a
person's sense of self is largely a reformable social
construction. A radical reform of the self will result in a
more comprehensive sense of self (or a less comprehensive
sense of self?) and the person will develop alternate forms
of speaking and writing. Foucault cites as examples of these
new and transgressive forms of writing the works of such
people as (surprise!) the Marquis de Sade.
(Note that language determines the contours of human
consciousness and that the sort of human consciousness
we have determines our language. Or is it the other
way around?)
"Explorers of literary space establish their importance in
how they quest" for an awareness of the areas where
limitations exist or those exact points where transgression
can take place, according to Wicks. "The result is often
literature with a violent erotic content and a disconcerting
language of terror." Foucault hails such explorers as
literary visionaries whose words have the power to break
through existing patterns of entrenched and habituated
modes of world-interpretation. Foucault puts a high value
on this disruptive activity. Most readers, though, find the
cliche-busting "transgressive" style unintelligible.
The modern writer's task is to exclude her presence from
her writings. "Language, as it is in itself, will then
supposedly appear, untainted by subjectivity -- a mode
of being present in one's writing that usually carries with
it the habitual adherence to ready-made meanings,
combined with a drive for systematicity which inevitably
results in being too reflective" (Wicks). Once the writer's
presence is removed from the writing, speaking about
the unspeakable will be possible, according to Foucault.
Wittgenstein takes another view: "What we cannot speak
about we must pass over in silence."
AUTHORSHIP
Foucault begins by observing that the concept of an author is
a relatively recent phenomenon. The concept is subject
to revision and even dissolution. He defines contemporary
writing by applying de Saussure's theory of meaning:
written words refer primarily neither to objects in the world
nor to the author who wrote them, but to other words.
Sometimes, as the words illuminate their linguistic position
within the network of language, they, like a stick of dynamite,
can introduce instability and cause a transformation of that
existing network (Wicks).
(This appears to be a category mistake. Words cannot
introduce instability; only people can introduce instability
into a human language.)
Foucault and Roland Barthes went on to prophesy that, as
a matter of cultural change, the role of author would soon
disappear. To date that has not happened, but this view did
help lead to some interesting reader-oriented approaches
to literary criticism in the 1970s.
AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE
Foucault's discussion of power emphasizes both the destructive
aspects of power and its creative aspects, which became his
focus during his later years. Power, he thought, could be
directed toward "self-creation" or a Nietzschean art of life.
He draws from Albert Camus the idea that the best way to
exist is "to appreciate fully and endlessly the sheer fact of
being alive" (Wicks). Foucault emphasizes artistic self-sculpting
in contrast to simply experiencing aesthetic stimuli. The
suspicion that this approach yields a socially irresponsible
hedonism strikes me as unwarranted, although Foucault's
passionate affair with pain and death may have led him to
behave irresponsibly during the AIDS epidemic.
Perhaps those who celebrate madness as a liberation from
the cliches of society tend to underestimate the suffering of
the mentally ill.
Best,
Gary
What a beautiful thought I am thinking
concerning a great speckled bird. . . .
-- from "The Great Speckled Bird"
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