(a) Said Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination

Michel Foucault As an Intellectual Imagination

Edward W. Said

boundary 2, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Autumn, 1972), pp. 1-36.

Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0190-3659%28197223%291%3A1%3C1%3AMFAAII%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K

boundary 2 is currently published by Duke University Press.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/duke.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

http://www.jstor.orgSat Sep 29 01:32:16 2007

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0190-3659%28197223%291%3A1%3C1%3AMFAAII%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K

http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html

http://www.jstor.org/journals/duke.html

MICHEL FOUCAULT AS AN INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION

by Edward W. Said

The work of salvage, removal of d= human remains etc has been entrusted to Messrs Michael Meade and Son ... under the general supervision of H.R.H., rear admiral the right honourable sir Hercules Hannibal Habeas Cor- pus Anderson. . . .

Joyce, Ulysses, ' ' ~ ~ c l o ~ s ' ' ~

Michel Foucault is a very brilliant writer. He now holds the Chair of Philosophy at the Coll6ge de France, and is the author of six books and numerous articles published over about ten years.2 Yet there are dangers in too quickly defining his work as philosophical, or historical for that matter. One danger is that ~oucault 's writing can be of overriding interest to literary critics, to novelists, to psychologists, medical men, biologists, and linguists (and in general to all those professionals who are interested in the past and contemporary states of their disciplines). Another, more interesting danger is that Foucault does not write philosophy or history as they are commonly experienced. He has a remarkable angle of vision, a highly disciplined and coherent one, that informs his work to such a degree as to make the work sui generis original, a claim Foucault himself would not make for it. However,the universality of his theories, and the intense

particularization of their meaning present the reader with a body of writing whose potential effect upon any one discipline has already been neut- ralized, which is to say that Foucault's theories are not intended to be used as a kind of pass-key for unlocking texts; but I shall return to this idea at the end of this essay. Foucault's combination of conceptual power with a

kind of ascetic nonchalance is forged in a style of high seriousness and elo- quence, and I think that i t makes a verbal phenomenon of a unique sort. His name for what he does is ' ' a r~heo lo~y , '~ a term he uses to designate both a basic level of research and, also, the study of collective mental archives, i.e., those epistemological resources making possible what is said a t any given period and where -- in what particular discursive space -- i t is said.

To the English-speaking reader Foucault's writing may appear abstract, a quality that for some reason is sometimes considered annoying, especially in work that is vaguely supposed to pertain to human experience. A word that frequently turns up in one after another of his works is&- faction, which means the refinement of words into thoroughly special, un- common, literally abstracted meanings. Now i f anything like an absolute law is recognized by Foucault i t is that all words, whether "abstract" or "concrete,' are delivered already rarified in utterance (Bnonc6). Thus Fou- cault's language is rarefied too, and highly saturated with nouns made of verbs of process (formation, appropriation, transmission, etc.) but he will maintain that the categories and the classes he formulates for utterance and discourse are themselves deliberately rarefied in advance; in that way his work meetsutteranceon its own ground and with instruments adequate for describing its states. This at once doubles his point about the polymor- phousness of rarefaction, which further intensifies the need for an attitude on the part of an alert scholar that considers special meaning to be the signifying activity of discourse. Foucault's position is that language in use is not natural; discourse does violence to nature, just as the use of words like "ohm,

I 1 I 1coulomb,'' and "volt1' to describe electrical quantities does vio-

lence to an otherwise undifferentiated physical force. On the other hand i t . I 11s natural'' for discourse to treat nature as an accident, as a&, in much the way that ~ea ts ' s dolls impugn the doll-maker for having accidentally "made" a child.

Quite apart from its real historical discoveries Foucault's archeological research has a profoundly imaginative side to i t as well, and i t is the broad lines of this that I wish to discuss here; I shall leave for another occasion a more detailed analysis of the theories that constitute his work. The course of his major work has been a gradual exposition of a more and more essentialized and ineluctable poetics of thought. Much the same progress can be found in the course from The Birth of Tragedy to, for example,

---- The Will to Power. Now Nietzsche has been one of the thinkers for whom Foucault has shown a strong affinity, and the correspondence between his philology and Foucault's archeology is very marked, not least in an approach to philosophy via recondite historical research. In both cases, since philology and archeology are primarily historical disciplines, i t is the special attitude to history that separates these two thinkers from other scholars. Indeed ~ietzsche's perception in the second of his Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen that the historical sense is a disease of history fairly characterizes the constitutive ambivalence towards history, the medical as well as the critical attitude, in ~oucaul t 's work also. Furthermore ~oucaul t 's doing of analytic work, like ~ietzsche's manner, is essentially a way of see- ing man and his past being dissolved by the historical sense: "le sens his- torique. . . ne doit Etre que cette acuit6 d'un regard qui distingue, repartit, disperse, laisse jouer les 6carts et les marges -- une sorte de regard dissociant capable de se dissocier lui-m8me et da6ffacer 11unit6 de cet &re humain qui est suppos6 le porter souverainement vers son I f a scholar's attach- ment to his discipline is pictured as primarily dynastic -- he carries on the work of his predecessors w e the field, whether the field is history or philology -- then ~oucaul t 's is anti-dynastic and is not the continuation of a line from privileged origin to present consciousness. Thus the relationships that Foucault's work are most concerned with are those of adjacence, complementarity, and correlation, which are not the same as linear ones of succession and interiority4; these latter ones are broken up by Foucault, redistributed as i t were, into the former ones.

I t is probably not a coincidence that the novel force of ~ietzsche's work at its best comes from his having put "pure'' philosophy second to his passions, venerations, friendships (Wagner, Christ, Socrates, Schopen- hauer, Dionysus, the Greeks). I n the main none of these perhaps was a subject that a philosopher need have treated in very great detail, at least so far as the main tradition was concerned. Yet Nietzsche flamboyantly considered his passions as events occurring simultaneously in the history of his spirit and in the history of thought generally. ~ h i l o s o ~ h ~ ' sofficial patri- mony obviously includes philosophers and philosophies and to these as doctrinal entities Nietzsche, like Foucault, pays only a tangential attention. Foucault's work feeds its ideas with poetry, the history of science, narrative fiction, linguistics, psychoanalysis as all these illuminate a given concept with a sense of its situational ambiance. Aside from Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, Foucault's range of interests includes Borges, Holderlin, de Sade, Mallarm&, Beckett, Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Blanchot, and of course all those authors he discusses at length in Folie et DBraison, Les Mots et lgs choses, Naissance & la clinique, and the book on Raymond Roussel. He has a high regard for Georges Canguihelm, Jean Hyppolite, and Gilles

Deleuze, a contemporary historian of science and two philosophers respectively, whose relations with their field he holds to be exemplary for him.

This latter observation is an important one for Foucault, since apart from the idiosyncrasies of his insights, i t is as the founder of a new field of research (or of a new way of conceiving and doing research) that he will continue to be known and regarded. When I mentioned imagination above, I had in mind the virtual re-presentation and re-perception of documentary and historical evidence by Foucault in so unusual a way as to have created for this evidence a new mental domain -- not history, nor philosophy, but l'archeology'l and "discourse" -- and a new habit of thought, a set of rules for knowledge to dominate truth, to make truth as an issue secondary to the successful ordering and wielding of huge masses of actual present knowledge. Most writers tend to place their thought, to locate i t as physically as thought can be located, either next to, or under, or apart from other thought. ~oucault 's central effort is to consider thoughts taking place primarily as events, to consider them precisely, consciously, pains- takingly as being mastered in his writing in their aleatory and necessary character as occurrences. He has had to re-orient and distort the meaning of words and phrases whose use as a m e a n s for thought has been so habit- ridden and so literally debasing as to have become completely unthinkable1 such words, concepts, and schema as change, continuity, relation, history: interiority, exteriority.

In a number of places, most notably in ~ ' 0 r d r e du discours and in his essay on Deleuze, Foucault has used the image of a theater to describe the interplay of philosophy with history with which his research is concerned. The image has a good many uses for him. First of all i t serves to fix study in one place and to make study as self-conscious as possible, instead of allowing whatever i t is that one studies to be everywhere and no place a t the same time, and one's mind a set of vague, superficial notes. Hence ~oucault 's dominant concern with space as the element in which language and thought occur. Second, to an attending spectator the theater offers a spectacular event, an event divisible into lesser events, each playing a part on the stage, each moving with reference to every other event on a number of different axes; in short, the theater's stage is where there occurs a play of events, embodied either in gestures, characters, groups of actions, or even in a changing scene. All this precisely fits ~oucault 's attitude towards what he calls ''l'existence des evenements discursifs dans une culture," their status as events and also their density as things -- that is, their speed and, paradoxically, their monumentality.

~ ' a ~ ~ e l l e r a iarchive, non pas la totalit6 des textes qui ont 6 conserv6es par une civilization, ni l'ensemble des

traces qu'on a pu sauver de son dessstre, mais le jeu des regles qui determinent dans une culture llapparition et la disparition des 6nonc6s, leur remanence et leur efface- ment, leur existence paradoxale d16v6nements et de

choses. Analyser les faits de discours dans 11616ment g6- n6ral de l'archive, c'est les consid6rer non point comme documents (d'une signification cachge, ou d'une rggle de construction), mais comme monuments; c'est en dehors de toute mktaphore ggologique, sans aucune assignation dlorigine, sans le moindre geste vers le commencement d'une xcLe -- faire ce qu'on pourrait appeler, selon les

droits ludiquesde l1Btymo~ogie, quelque chose comme une archgologie.

The stance implied in this statement is that Foucault examines said things (les choses dites) as they happen before him. His attitude to the past is that of a spectator watching an exhibition of many events, and what Fou- cault's reader watches is an exciting intellectual exhibition --and I do not by any means intend this to be a pejorative description. In order to be a

spectator, which in this case wrongly implies passivity, there must first be a re-ordering of documents so that they shed their inertness and become a sort of measurable activity; this re-ordering, or re-orienting of texts from the past takes a maximum of intellectual and scholarly energy.

No idea more crucially connects this re-orienting task of Fou- cault's work with the thought of a surprising majority of contemporary thinkers than the complex one of anonymity, or in the terms Roland Barthes, LBvi-Strauss, and Lacan have used, the idea of the loss of the subject. This has frequently (and comically) been mistaken simply as an in- ability to talk about anything -- e.g., ' ' I have no subject for my essay or novel'' -- although the consequent periphrasis ("without a subject I simply write or talk around a void") is part of the correct meaning of the lost subject. (-) Subject in its more exact context means the thinking subject or the speaking subject, the subjectivity that defines human identity, the cogito that enables the Cartesian world of objects. The influence of the thinking subject in Western thought has, of course, been profound. Not only has the subject guaranteed ideas of priority and originality, but also ideas, methods, and schemes of continuity and achievement, endowing them libidinally with a primal urgency underlying all patterns of succession, history and progress. History in the main has acquired its intelligibil- i ty through a kind of anthropomorphism projected onto and into events and collectivities of various sorts; these are then thought of as functions of a subject, and not vice versa. Of course the influence of the process of

human generation has been paramount, forcing us to think of literature, for example, as merely an imitation of the human family.

The two principal forces that have eroded the authority of the human subject in contemporary reflection are, on the one hand the host of problems that arise in defining the subject's authenticity and, on the other, the development of disciplines like linguistics and ethnology that dramatize the subject's anomalous and unprivileged, even untenable position in thought.6 The first force can be viewed as a disturbance taking place at the interior of thought, the second as having to do with the subject's exteriority to thought. Together they accomplish one end. For of what comfort is a kind of geological descent into identity from level to lower level of identity, if no one point can be said confidently to b_e iden-tity? And of what philosophical use is i t to be an individual if one's mind and language, the structure of one's primitive classifications of reality, are functions of a transpersonal mind so organized as to make individual subjectivity less a reality than one fiction among others?

~oucault 'sresponse has been not to dispute these seemingly bleak perspectives, but to absorb and understand them fully, and then to give them an important basic role to play in his work. I think that i t is the positiveness of Foucault's attitude to the loss of the subject as much as his explicit methodological philosophy that determines the invigoration he communicates. Not for him is the noisy appeal to a cult of doctrine, or apocalypse, or dogma; he is persistently interested in the responsibilities and the offices of his method, and also in the untidiness and the swarming profuseness of detail. Like a medieval Islamic critic of poetry he formulates rules that cover every instance of authorial flair, thus reducing the originality of any writer he reads to an accident occurring within the latent, ordered possibilities of all language. The impersonal modesty of Foucault's writing coexists (paradoxically) with an unmistakable tone of voice that can deliver prodigies of insight and learning, but he gives the impression nonetheless of having experienced at first-hand every one of the books he has read. This may seem like something to be expected in the work of any learned scholar, but in Foucault's case the epistemological status of a book, or of a collection of tracts and books, is in his methodology a complex theoretical issue brought to the level of performance, as i t were, in the actual practice of Foucault's writing.

A good way of verifying this is by remarking the extent to which Foucault makes one aware that writing, books, and authors are concepts that do not always entail each other in exactly the same way. Moreover they mean considerably different things at different times. A book like the Koran, for example, is a theme and a myth, as much as it also is a i l object or the work of an individual author. In several essays scattered

throughout his career Foucault has ingeniously explored these variations in stress and meaning, particularly as he finds them taking place among variations in the value of rhetoric, of language, of fiction, of the library. I n each case Foucault distinguishes between the thing-itself ( in a Kantian or Platonic sense) and thoughts about it, or uses made of it. This prelimin- ary demarcation of things -- verbal things,that is -- into ideal or essential object and specific signifying quality emanating from the word for the object onto a field of verbal praxis, is a fundamental one for Foucault, but fundamental in that it is for him a distinction without a real difference. Essences are words at most, and they do not have the capacity really to divide being into essence and predicates. He permits ''essences'' no more than as designating powers, and certainly not as powers that divide reality into higher and lower plateaus of being. Words about essences are, of course, words too; according to Foucault the job is then to place all these

I ' I 1words in relation to each other, words as essences (''idea, author," "things," "book," "languagett) and words making contingent =of essences ( ' ' the good,tt "de sade," "~ i j lder l in 's poetry,

I 1 I t ~rench," and so on). Or,

to use a notion that Foucault employs continually, the task for the arch- eologist is to understand words interdiscursively and &discursively, all words, but especially those with the power to dominate fairly large masses of other words -- words like the ''author de sade" whose words f i l l several large volumes -- and to understand them as events, without necessary re- course to a biographical fallacy.

There are some habits of thought that prevent that k indof understanding, and it is t o the credit o f philosophers like Nietzsche and Deleuze, to both of whose philosophies Foucault devotes appreciative analyses, t o have made their philosophy an attack on these habits. Much depends on the role of the subject in maintaining thought away from events, and in what Foucault, following Deleuze, calls a Platonization that needs overturning.7 On a primary epistemological plane therefore Foucault sets out t o re-dispose and re-deploy thought in a primordial mental space, much as an artist takes the representational space of his work in an active manner, rather than passively as an inert surface. The filled, activated space of a given epoch he calls an 6pist6me; the fil l ing is discourse, a body that has temporal duration and is comprised of 6nonc6s (utterances). (One curious thing about the Bpist6m'e i s that,like structure for the structuralists, it i s available neither to introspection nor to the epoch to which i t belongs. As Canguihelm puts i t : l l ~ o u r que 1'6~ist6m'e de llsge classique apparct comme objet, il fallait se situer au point oh, participant de 1~6~ is tdmb du X I X ~ ,on ktait assez loin de sa naissance pour voir la rupture avec le XVI I le siecle, et assez proche pour imaginer qu'on v a z u n e autre rupture, celle aprks laquelle l l ~ o m m e , tout comme auparavant ltOrdre, appara?tra comme

un objetl'.)* I n order to think a discursive event in all i t s immediacy and com-

plexity, Foucault needs coordinately to describe: the field, or Qpist&me, in which such an event can be said to take place, the nature of an utterance- event, relations between events, the kind of conceptual changes that events deliver, and above all, a method adequate to all these tasks. (Incidentally, he i s not concerned with the effect of conceptual changes upon man; only with changes in concepts,) Neo-positivism, phenomenology, and the philosophy of history, he contends, evade rather than accept the task. The complexity and difficulty of the project is evident. What is not quickly evident perhaps i s how much the reader must be involved in a process simultaneously entailing disordering, decreation, and r e - ~ r d e r i n ~ . ~ Moreover the feats Foucault accomplishes finally come to be seen as comprising a sort of kinematic work of the intellectual imagination acting within history, whose materials are thoughts and words about thoughts and words. Dup-licity -- an imaginative and philosophical doubleness -- is Foucaultls deep- est enterprise. I t is the game of domination played between thought claiming truth and thought claiming knowledge, a seriously urgent set of moves between truth and the will to truth: "il s1agit de risquer la destruction du sujet de connaissance dans la volont6, indgfiniment de'ploy6e, de savoir."1°

Foucault's mind has a predilection for thinking in threes and fours, so i t is of some use to put his themes next to each other and with each other in parallel series. I shall be concerned to show that Foucault's method i s to connect one major tripartite constellation with a major quad- rilateral set, and thereafter to impose them on each other. The announced imperatives of archeological research for the present and the future are given by Foucault as follows in ~ ' 0 r d r e du discours:

A) . . . la philosophie de l16v6nement devrait slavancer dans la direction paradoxale au premier regard d'un ma-terialisme de l'incorporel.

6) . . . il faut Blaborer -- en dehors des philosophies du sujet et du temps -- une thkorie des syst6macit6s discontinues.

C) I I faut accepter dlintroduire l1al6a comme categorie dans la production des 6vvknements. L9 encore se fait sentir llabsence d'une th6orie permettant de penser les rapports du hasard et de la pens6e.1

This set of imperatives involves radically introducing "Ighasard, le discon-

--

- - - - - -

tinue, et mat6rialit6" into thought.12 In short, Foucault intends the re-inclusion into thought of elements that had been banished as disrup-tive from lat to's philosophy onwards. He argues that Hegel was the one philosopher whose dialectic so compelled thought into continuities that any radical philosopher since Hegel has to think against Hegel.

Foucault further asserts that one instrumentality for having kept disruption a t bay has been the elision of reality and discourse -- that is, the process by which discursive functions, which are the focal point of Fou- cault's analyses and what, more than anything, he is now studying, have been considered to be an immediate making visible of thought, rather than the series of verbal events (characterized by change, discontinuity, and materiality acting in conjunction with each other and with thought) with a life of their own. Thus the roles of the founding subject (le sujet fondateur),of originating experience (l1exp8rience originateur) and of universal mediation (l'universelle mgdiation) have been to cover and legitimate a philosophic ideology in ?n/hich discourse is a servile instrument of thought and/or truth, but never an on-going reality with a quite peculiar behavior (discursivity) of its own.13

In seeking to instate chance, discontinuity, and materiality, to locate them as forces operating in discourse, Foucault lists four exigences de mdthode which he proposes to follow. These exigencies are as much principles controlling study as they are rules maintaining discursivity. This dual role is crucial, for i t legitimizes ~oucault 's method as i t describes its object. ~oucault 's formulation of these rules is in part polemical and in part explanatory. My first reference for each of the four in what follows is to L1Ordre du discours, although -- as I gloss each one in some detail --everything he says in this late work draws substantially on what he did in Folie et DQraison, Les Mots et les choses, Naissance d_e la clinique, L ' A ~ -

ch6oloqie du savoir and in several interpretive essays.

1. The first principle Foucault lists is reversibility:

. . . I2 o;, selon la tradition, on croit reconna7tre la source des discours, le principe de leur foisonnement et de leur continuit6, dans ces figures qui semblent jouer un role positif, comme celle de l'auteur, de la discipline, de la volontk, i l faut plut6t reconnaTtre le jeu nkgatif d'une d6coupe et d'une rarefaction du d i s c o ~ r s . ~ ~

Those traditional conceptions of primacy such as source or origin, the principles of continuity and development, and those metaphors for originating authority such as ''author,'' lldisciplinell and "the will to truth1' are all more or less cancelled by Foucault. For him they are secondary to the discourse, functions of it, rather than prime movers of it. Much in this reversal dependson what Foucault means by discourse (discours), a notion that has a rich history in contemporary French w r i t i F ~ r o m a linguistic point of view discourse gains its status as a mode of verbal usage in opposition to historical narration. Emile ~enveniste's heuristic definition is based upon correlations between verb tenses and modes of speech, correlations which constitute two quite different systems.

The historical utterance, todav reserved to the written language, characterizes the narration of past events. These three terms. "narration.

I 1 I 1event." and

"past" are of equal importance. Events that took place at a certain moment of time are presented without any intervention of the speaker in the narration. I n order for them to be recorded as having occurred, these events must belong to the past . . . . We shall define historical narration as the mode o f utterance that excludes every llautobiographicalll linguistic form. The historian will never say & or & or maintenant, because he will never make use of the formal apparatus of discourse, which re- sides primarily in the relationship of the persons @:&. . . . The field of temporal expression will be similarly defined. The historical utterance admits of three tenses: the aorist . . . , the imperfect . . . , and the pluperfect.16

I t must be noted that the events mentioned here are not the events Fou- cault i s interested in. Benveniste is speaking o f historical events, not discursive ones. He then notes that,so delimited, historical utterance necessarily implies a contrasting 'lplane of discourse":

Discourse [discours] must be understood in i t s widest sense: every utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer, and in the speaker, the intention of influencing the other in some way. I t i s primarily every variety of oral discourse of every nature and every level, from trivial conversation to the most elaborate oration. But it is also the mass of writing that reproduces oral discourse or that borrows i t s manner of expression and its purposes: cor-

respondence, memoirs, plays, didactic work, in short, all the genres in which someone addresses himself to someone, proclaims himself as the speaker, and organizes what he says in the category of person. The distinction we are making between historical narration and discourse does not at all coincide with that between the written language and spoken.

Neither of these definitions is anything more than schematic, since historical narration and discours shade into each other in practice as often as the speaker changes the intent of his speech from historical narration to discourse and back again. Foucault has used the kind of dis- crimination made by Benveniste to emphasize discourse as an organized and recognizable manner of transmitting information or knowledge from one person to another for intentional reasons. Thus even a chronicle, while i t is primarily an historical narration, belongs to an ensemble o f discursive texts transmitting history within an integral institution called historical writing, an institution that has definable relations to drama, to medical texts, to economic texts, and also to designated readers. Discursivity then emerges as largely an intertextual relationship. I f the historical narrative as an ideal mode dramatizes the immediacy of passing time, utterance as discourse emphasizes the way in which language has taken on the preserved historical form and the materialism of a text -- a documentary event subject to specific laws of formation, preservation, and transmission.

A still more complicated notion of discourse, of which, I think, Foucault avails himself, derives from psychology. Lacan has characterized the speech in the analytic encounter as the discours du sujet. 01-11y here the quasi-objective account of himself as subjectivity forces him to discover the fundamental alienation that made him, during his life, create himself as an &r, which must always be unmasked by an other (' 'car dans ce travail qulil fait de la construire pour un autre il retrouve 11ali6nation fondamentale qui la lui a fait construire comme un autre, et qui l'a toujours destin6e ?I lui &tre d6rob6 par un autre1',)18he essence of this, put simply, is ~acan's contention that self-discourse involves the creation of a paranoiac system for which the model, I think, is ~ r e u d ' s Dr. Schreber. Any attempt made to relay the subject always involves the subject's objectification of himself, which in extreme cases like schreberls is a fantastic hodgepodge of fantasy and fact; discourse of self then is a perpet-ually distanced speech, emptied of the real, elusive subject in order that the existential self can have clarity and definition, for others, outside itself. -

Since discourse always implies a speaker and a hearer, Foucault combines linguistic usage with psychological insight to assert that speaker

and hearer are functions operating in the discourse. They preserve i t s form-ality and the assurance that it will be transmitted even as they repress the "true" reality outside, or beneath, the spoken chain. (Needless to say, the l'outside" reality loses its solidity, and interest, quite soon in Foucault's writing. Which is not to say that he i s uninterested in anything except words but that the pertinence of his analysis is to what actually is there in words.) I t becomes futile -- because radically inaccurate -- to view a speaker as really beginning a discourse, still less as being its master. Rather the speaker is fora discourse. His identity gives it a provisional start or finish (this is dCcoupage or rarefaction), but for i t s total sense it depends upon circumstances that have to do with the speaker's identity in a very con- trolled way. In other words, the relation between discourse and speaker i s governed by rules that antedate the speaker's appearance and postdate his disappearance. DBcoupagg as negativity and rarefaction is Foucault's way of describing the detachment of one discursive unit -- a text by an author, for example -- from the main positivity; this lends the text a "rarefied" appearance of individual existence apart from the great number of conditions that override and determine i t s belonging to the main body.

Earlier in ~ ' 0 r d r e du discours Foucault had discussed the manner by which an author could be studied as having himself entered the realm of discourse and distinguished his particular subjectivity from others in the same body. Foucault's notion again is that this is a matter of discernible rules: rituals are performed (initiation ceremonies, the need to belong to societies), certain doctrines are subscribed to, a particular form of educ- ation is prescribed, etc.19 For a medical doctor to produce a clinical text and have thestatusof its authorship he must have been to a medical school, he must belong to a medical society (usually by governmental certifica- tion), and so on. To speak clinically is to speak o f medical subjects in a very special way.20 Moreover the "author" in this case produces his own discourse as part of an alternation between, on the one hand, repeating the formal rules and, on the other, varying them to admit his own instances. A given text therefore i s an event that has appreciable and prepared relations with other texts or events, and strictly speaking is not a creation.

2. A principle of discontinuity:

. . . ~ u ' i ly ait dessyst~mesderarefactionne veut pas dire qu'au-dessous d'eux, ou au.del3 d'eux, rCgnerait un grand discours illimit6, continu et silencieux qui se trouverait, par eux, re'prim6 et refoul6, et que nous aurions pour tache de faire lever en lui restituant enfin la parole. II ne faut pas imaginer, parcourant le monde et entrela~ant

----

avec toutes ses formes et tous ses &vGnements, un non-dit ou un impens6, qulil slagirait dlarticuler ou de penser enfin. Les discours doivent &re trait& comme des pra-tiques discontinues, qui se croisent, se jouxtent parfois, mais aussi bien slignorent ou s 'exc~uent.~ '

Systems of rarefaction are discursive groups (literature, history, psychology) part of whose self-definition includes the definition, or the implica- tion of their difference (symbolic, signifying, intentional, formal) from other groups. This idea of differences can be theoretically extended to include differences between societies, or between different orders with in a society. Up through and including Les Mots et les choses Foucault had been studying the history of relations between systems as much to determine their internal cohesion with each other, as their differences from each other. Folie et DQraison, which has been grossly misinterpreted as an historical description of madness, was in fact a study o f the relation between sameness and difference expressed in the most basic of social terms; that is, Foucault argued that a society's identity (its own self-rarefaction) rested in some measure upon its detachment from what was not itself. Insofar as members of a society spoke a mutually intelligible language they were members of a discursive group with countless subdivisions, from which the insane, since the disappearance of leprosy at the end of the Middle Ages, have been excluded. Foucault therefore studies the changing significance of madness -- actually, I1madness" itself i s a dated notion limited to one era in time, and is not a universal concept -- in the discourse of the non-mad. He shows how a realm that i s itself silent with reference to the world of rational discourse i s apprehended in the language of reason: as madness, insanity, alienation, irrationality, animality, depravity -- in short, as a term of otherness domesticated to the discourse, made to serve i t s needs and exigencies. As these exigencies are modified socially and institutionally, as well as rationally, the discourse of silence is given differing interpretations, incorporated, covered, and articulated in the discourse of reason.

Because of the work he has done after Folie et DQraison a n d k s Mots et les choses it is not altogether wrong, I think, to surmise that Fou- cault cares more for histories than he does for History. Since Nietzsche, portmanteau categories like exteriority and interiority, causaiity, continuity, totality and genealogy no longer have the power to deal adequately with evidence of the sort Foucault deploys. Yet these categories have traditionally been subordinated to a grand enveloping notion of History, within which they all functioned. In ~oucau l t ' s view history i s but one discourse among many, and since the quantity of differing discourses makes the problem of specifying their interrelationship more immediate than the

--

-- --

problem of whether one discourse has an absolutely greater or lesser power to command the others, there is a need for developing a kind of affirmative thought "sans contradiction, sans dialectique, sans n6gation."22 Evidence is no longer thought of as secondary to an Idea, multiplicity is made up of a variety o f divergences and disjunctions between equally valid, relatively weightless

I tbits,

I1 and being i s ultimately univocal, without levels, hier-

archies, or gradations of reality. These features make i t difficult t o expect that Foucault's work be a narrative chronicle o f consecutive happenings, even though he frequently confines his reflections to a specific historical epoch.

Today, he says, language - - whether studied or written -- occupies a space which is not defined by Rhetoric but by the ~ i b r a r ~ . ~ ~ Language no longer can be thought of as incarnating anything but itself as monoton- ously as Narcissus saw himself in the water. The substitution o f the library for rhetoric as a conception for thinking o f language and human verbality is a stunning idea, and it is one among many affinities that Foucault has with Borges. A library is a total, infinitely absorptive system, infinitely self-referential (think of the catalogues, the unlimited possibility of cross- references there and in the books), numerically vast in its elements, and impersonal. So organized and complete a world i s at once perfectly repet- itive and perfectly actual. The sheer actuality of repeated units (and whether they are books, words, ideas or discourses, they are simply modes of language) is a sufficiency that dismisses an outside or inside extra-verbality. ~oucaul t 's insistence on this point is not made to declare that everything is words. I t is rather to accentuate the striking actuality of the scholar's enterprise, and in so doing to attach delaying tactics like appeals to The Idea of the History which every document i s supposed to represent.

Indeed Foucault's profound distrust of mimetic representation and theological a prioris goes even further. Analogy, correlation, correspondence, adjacence and complementarity are, as I said above, the relations that interest him, but behind them and what permits such relations is no scheme of imitation conceived as representation. A discourse does not represent an idea, or embody a figure: i t simply repeats, in a different mode, another discourse.24 The extraordinary variety of discourse today is a result of the decline of representation. This is the one linear historical development that Foucault cannot do without -- it is a central theme of Les Mots g les choses. When language is no longer thought of as a kind of secondary transparency through which Being shone, then, for examp!e, the past becomes only the cumulative repetition of designated words. Such a past lasts only so long as its elements, which make i t possible and not the other way around, have value. Thus each epoch defines forms and limits of sayability, of conversation, of memory, of the reactivation o f preceding

cultures or foreign ones, of appropriation.25 And since the very notion of an epoch is itself a function of these limits and forms, we must more cor- rectly say that each discursive formation articulates the limits and forms of its own existence, inseparable from others. Therefore the Library holds together, in ways Foucault tries to specify, a staggeringly vast array of discursive formations, an array whose essence is that no source, origin, prov- enance, no goal, teleology or purpose can be thought through for it.

Mere affirmation of this complexity seems hardly a satisfactory

ploy. Foucault had been honestly impressed by the threshold to which he reached:

Is that not what Nietzsche was paving the way for when, in the interior space of his language, he killed man and God both a t the same time, and thereby promised with the Return the multiple and re-illumined light of the gods? Or must we quite simply admit that such a pleth-ora of questions on the subject of language is no more than a continuance, or at most a culmination, of the event that, as archaeology has shown, came into existence and began to take effect at the end of the eighteenth century? The fragmentation of language, occurring at the same time as its transition to philological ob- jectivity, would in that case be no more than the most recently visible (because the most secret and most fundamental) consequence of the breaking up of Classical order; by making the effort to master this schism and to make language visible in its entirety, we would bring to completion what had occurred before us, and without us, towards the end of the eighteenth century. But what, in that case, would that culmination be? In attempting to reconstitute the lost unity of language, is one carry- ing to its conclusion a thought which is that of the nineteenth century, or is one pursuing forms that are already incompatible with it? The dispersion of language is linked, in fact, in a fundamental way, with thearchaeol- ogical event we may designate as the disappearance of Discourse. To discover the vast play of language contained once more within a single space might be just as decisive a leap towards a wholly new form of thought as to draw to a close a mode of knowing constituted during the previous century.

I t is true that I do not know what to reply to

-- ---

such questions, or, given these alternatives, what term I would choose. I cannot even guess whether I shall ever be able to answer them, or whether the day will come when I shall have reasons enough to make any such choice.26

Later, with ~ ' ~ r c h 6 o l o ~ i e du discours and the two es- du savoir, ~ ' 0 r d r e says on Nietzsche, Foucault began to formulate his decisions and reasons for them. First, through an attention to dispersion and fragmentation: not to Discourse, but to discourses and discursivity. Second, through an attention to seriality as an internal order within dispersal. That is, Fou-cault devoted his time to understanding how discourse multiplied itself serially, as a result of its constitution and dynamics, rather than as a secondary repetition in words of natural organic forms. Archeology and order, the two terms he used in his titles, indicate respectively "an ensemble of rulest' that define the archive of any given period, and the regulative principles within discourse. This leaves him free to treat discourse as discontinuity bound together, i f at all, by exigent rules for particular and material, but never transcendent, purposes. He has found ~ietzsche's word Ent- stehunq useful to describe the "pure distance'' separating discoveries from

each other, and permitting their identities to emerge with reference to each other; this field of distance is, he says, an open space of inter-discursive on front at ion.^^

In all this, quite obviously language plays a central role. Foucault has published numerous essays in which the nature of language has been the underlying subject, but what is curious in all these shorter pieces is the ability he has ( in common with many of the structuralists) to speak of language as a precisely defineable entity. I t is something with its own special history, geography, and spirituality, as well as corporeality; I suppose it is correct to say also that language has i t s own language, its own mythology and imagination. The common motif i s that language has been transformed into an a-human phenomenon. On a number of occasions Foucault imagin- atively interprets the Odyssey as marking some themes that adumbrate the formerly human nature of language. Like The Thousand and One Nights, the Odyssey is a text rooted in the postponement of death and disaster. ' ' 1 I se peut bien . . . que les dieux aient envoy6 les malheurs aux mortels pour qutils puissent les raconter, et qu'en cette possibilite' la parole trouve son infinie r e s ~ o u r c e . ' ~ ~ * Hence Odysseusts brilliant verbal wi t . Yet he i s also a man who is returning home, and when in Pheacia he hears his own story told by Demodokos in the past tense as i f i t were the tale of a dead hero, he cries, forcing himself to sing the song of his identity. Thus told, his identity further distances him from a death seemingly decreed for him by

language. This complex of interconnected stories that tell stories with death hovering by fascinates Foucault. I t suggests to him both the play of mirrors that establishes the resourcefulness of language, as well as the presence of death its neighbor. Moreover:

Ecrire pour la culture occidentale, ce serait d1entr6e de jeu se placer dans llespace virtuel de llauto-repr&sentation et du redoublement; l'kcriture signifiant non la chose, mais la parole, lloeuvre du langage ne ferait rien d'autre qu'avancer plus profondement dans cette impalpable Bpaisseur du miroir, susciter le double de ce double qulest deja 116criture, d6couvrir ainsi un infini possible et impossible, poursuivre sans terme la parole, la maintenir au delB de la mort qui la condamne, et liberer le ruisselle- ment d'un murmure. Cette prksence de la parole r6p6tke dans llBcriture donne sans doute ?I ce que nous appelons une oeuvre un statut ontologique inconnu 'a ces cultures, oh, quand on kcrit clest la chase msme qu'on de'signe, en son corps propre, visible, obstingment inaccessible au temps.29

Elsewhere he asserts that the theme of ~ d ~ s s e u s ' s return, with the influence of its anchoring in a human situation and in a specific place and time, has been a fundamental restraint (une courbe fondamentale) upon language which, during this century, has been released from any curbs on it.30 Language now has become a thing of space; as a medium language is 116space universe1 dlinscription and i t speaks to us by means of "116cart, la distance, 11interm6diaire, la dispersion, la fracture, la diff6rence.'13' These are not literary themes but givens of today's language. The importance of such writers as Bataille, de Sade and Freud is that because of them even sexuality was denaturalized, made to submit to and thrown into the empty space of language. Indeed, for Foucault this sort of feat is associated with a new heroism, that of the artist, which has displaced the heroism of the epic hero. In a great essay on Holderlin, Foucault remarks that the epic quality of the modern artist arises during the Renaissance when representational painters created a new world, which revealed itself to be another version of the same world in which men live. ' l ~ a dimension de 11h6roique est passee du hkros 'a celui uui le re~rgsente au moment o'u la culture occidentale est devenue elle-mzme un monde de repr&sentations.1132 In the work of an artist like Holderlin, Foucault finds commemorated simultaneously the death of God and the new sovereign status of language, the connected problematics of absence and presence, and beneath those, the complex

--

play of signifiers detached from a stable signified that results ( in Holder- lints extreme case) from the "no" filling the (dead) father's place: all this is made possible when the world i s no longer conceived of as representation, but instead, Foucault says in "~ietzsche, Marx. ~ reud , " as interpr6-

-For the sixteenth century the world was viewed as a system of

resemblances (conventia, sympatheia, emulatio, signatura, analogia) which together yield a consensus leading directly to God. Opposed to this was an order of simulacra, false resemblance, leading directly to the ~ e v i 1 . ~ ~ As we saw earlier, for the nineteenth century the arch-signified God-father was perceived as absence. Hence the sign could not be taken as it once was, inhabiting a homogenous and undifferentiated space of reciprocal relations between man, nature and God; rather signs belong in a far more diff- erentiated, tiered space which i s totally exterior and irreducibly disjunctive. Foucault then describes this verbal space as containing no primary or secondary signs, but rather already-interpreted signs in need of further re-interpretation. I t is precisely at this point that Foucault locates his own work, as furthering the work begun by Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, for whom language was an on-going hermeneutics of itself and not a primary given. Discontinuity then is the inaugural principle according to which one could begin to assemble together an encyclopedia -- llune sorte de Corpus g6n6ralet' -- of interpretations:35 the discontinuity is based on differences between discourses (themselves interpretive bodies regulated by internal rules, and by their relations, whether antithetical or sympath- etic, with adjacent discourse), whose integral thematic i s "la revolution r6p6titive de lt3tre autour de la d i f f e ' r e n ~ e . " ~ ~In this convergence of diff- erenceand repetition Foucault confirms the triumph of seriality over unity, the latter with its arsenal of a priori categories that elide differences and its nostalgia for organic forms.

3. A principle of specificity:

. . . ne pas re'soudre le discours dans un jeu de significa- tionspr6alables [such as unity,for example]; ne pas s'imaginer que le monde tourne vers nous un visage lisible que nous nlaurions plus qula dCchiffrer; il n'est pas com- plice de notre connaissance; il n t y a pas de providence pr6discursive qui le dispose en notre faveur. I I faut con- cevoir le discours comme une violence que nous faisions aux choses, en tout cas comme une pratique que nous leur imposons; et clest dans cette pratique que les 6vGne- ments des discours trouvent le principe de leur rGgula-

A major branch of ~oucault 's historical inquiry has been the definition of how i t is that discourse confirms and maintains its individuality. Here too de Sade plays an epitomizing role, for his work makes monstrously explicit what Foucault calls "the Universal Characteristic of ~esire." The Classical Age -- roughly the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries -- had conceived reality in terms of representation: I1~anguage is simply the representation of words; nature is simply the representation of beings; need is simply the representation of needs."38 Every utterance could thereby be referred back to an original source and understood as its representative: in a complete system of taxonomies,therefore, any instance has reference dynastically back to an Urphanomen. Underpinning this consensus of representation, however, is a disequilibrium between representation itself and "the empirical domains": in-thought, the iatter is held in by the former. Then:

The end of Classical thought -- and of the 6pist6me that made general grammar, natural history, and the science of wealth [these are the modes of knowledge by which language, nature, and value respectively are made acces- sible to thought in the Classical period] possible - - will coincide with the emancipation of language, of the liv-

ing being, and of need, with regard to representation. The obscure but stubborn spirit of a people who talk, the violence and the endless effort of life, the hidden energy of needs, were all to escape from the mode of being of representation. And representation itself was to be paralleled, limited, circumscribed, mocked perhaps, but in any case regulated from the outside, by the enormous thrust of a freedom, a desire, or a will posited as the metaphysical converse of consciousness. Something like a will or a force was to arise in the modern experience -- constituting i t perhaps, but in any case indicat- ing that the Classical age was now over, and with i t the reign of representative discourse, the dynasty of a representation signifying itself and giving voice in the sequence of its words to the order that lay dormant within things.3g

The force, will, or desire derives from empirical experience, in de ~ade 's case a pure libertinage of desire to name every sexual possibility. And

these new possibilities batter down the limits imposed on sexuality by representation. Every one of de ~ade ' s scenes i s a pure instance of sexuality without precedent, and original in itself; hence it stands as a surface without depth, an articulation without informing rationality.

Between them Nietzsche and Mallarmk further essentialize discourse and release i t from the hold on i t of a speaker and a representative function. After de Sade an utterance i s not decipherable simply by tracing i t to a source (a speaking subject), whose identity i s supposed to be repre- sented by the discourse. Nietzsche dramatizes the difficulty of attribution by asking of each utterance to identify its origin as follows: who was the holder of discourse, who was the possessor of the word? The diversity and the totality of discourse, which corresponds in its seriality to the succes-

-sion of scenes in de sadets fiction, makes i t impossible to answer thesa questions by supplying a name from outside the discourse.

~a l la rm6 's project -- that of enclosing all possible discourse within the fragile density of the word, within that slim, material black line traced by ink upon paper - - is fundamentally a reply to the question imposed upon philosophy by Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, i t was not a matter of knowing what good and evil were in themselves, but of who was being designated, or rather* was speaking.. . . To the Nietzschean question: "who i s speaking?", Mallarm6 replies -- and constantly reverts to that reply -- by saying that what is speaking is, in i t s sol-itude, in i t s fragile vibration, in i t s nothingness, the word itself -- not the meaning of the word, but its enigmatic and precarious being. Whereas Nietzsche maintained his questioning as to who is speaking right up to theend.. . Mallarm6 was constantly effacing himself from his own language to the point of not wishing to figure in it except as an executant in a pure ceremony of the Book in which the discourse would compose itself.. . .40

The break between speaker and discourse makes it incumbent upon discourse to gain i t s specificity, i t s subject, elsewhere, and not with reference back to a manipulative sujet fondateur. As an example of the specifically contemporary predicament Foucault i s fond of quoting this from ~ecket t ' s

-The Unnamable: ' l ~ u l i m ~ o r t equi parle, quelqulun a dit, qu'importe qui parle.'l Therefore the analysis of discourse cannot begin by specifying an author for a given discourse unless authorship is defined precisely with regard to the practical field of the discourse in question. Thus to say that X

--

is the author of Y could mean, for example, that X designates a collection of unknown writers (Homer or Dionysus the Areopagite), or that X is the legal author (de Sade, whose authority over his novels and tracts involved a criminal liability), or that X is the author of that of discourse (Freudian and Marxist writing), or that X is the author of Y because Y re-sembles Z (the notion of consistency between different works leading to the attribution of a single author) and so forthm4' The stability of a discourse depends upon something less provisional than an author, both in the short and in the long run.

Discourse is frequently given minimal coherence by the persistence of its subject matter; this is true of psychoanalytic writing or of clinical writing, for instance. For these examples and others like them Foucault enumerates a group of three criteria that, operating together, establish the systematic character (that is, the regularity) of the discourse. In ~ ' 0 r d r e du discours he adds to this group what he calls procedures of exclusion: these procedures set up, but ceaselessly modify, the limits of a discourse, its frontiers, beyond which everything is non-discursive and foreign to it. Thus concepts of what is forbidden, what is mad, and what is wrong police the limits of a given discourse, and keep out what threatens the permissib- ility, rationality and truth enclosed within that discourse.42 Inside -- and now we come to the first of the three criteria -- there have to be principles of formation working to govern the way in which concept, object, theory, and operation -- no matter how diverse -- partake of the same discursivity; these principles of formation and not a formal structure, nor a coherent conceptual architecture, nor the unity of a persistent object, are what make i t possible to call discourse X "economics" or discourse Y "general grammar." Foucault is attempting to describe an extremely intimate level of activity of the sort, for example, that makes i t possible for an economist to use language and thought professionally. This is not a matter only of learning the jargon, but of being able to address others -- economists and non-economists-- as an economist speaking economics.

When one's perspective is shifted to account for the role of history in the individualizing of discourse, a second set of principles emerges: principles of threshold or of transformation. Here we must allow that a confluence of different circumstances has to take place in order for a discourse to be formed. Not only that, but since discourse is itself a specific process of change there is good reason for articulating an anterior set of transformations out of which the given discourse appears, and a set of pre- sumably future conditions which in its movement in time the discourse will fulfill. Thirdly, there are criteria of correlation. No discourse is an isolated phenomenon despite its individuality. Consider that one discourse has specific relations with others -- say clinical discourse with biology, with

philosophy, with history -- and in addition to those relations there are precise non-discursive relationships (i.e., institutional, political, and economic) that maintain discourse's identity. Again clinical discourse i s a good example, for it cannot properly be thought of apart from i t s existence as a discipline, an institution, a system of organization, an outlook and so forth. The merest clinical utterance of a doctor in his professional capacity is thus supported by a complex, but highly articulated, web of events that have to take place -- they are not vague, or just there -- in order for him to speak, or act, clinically. Al l the criteria Foucault lists are ways of measuring and characterizing the distances between events: discourse, in other words, is the particular occupied space, insofar as it is acted within and upon, that enables positive (although not necessarily conscious) knowledge for any coherent activity.43 How do an economist, a psychiatrist, or a literary critic make their way in their work? What traditions must they assume, what institutions, distinctions, codes, symbolism? And these without necessary reference to an individual but always to something called economics, psychiatry, literary criticism; these are some of the questions for which answers are provided by discourse.

The originality of ~oucau l t ' s criteria is the effect of their use t_o-gether. After all for formation above we can substitute orthodoxy (what every economist must know), for transformation history, and for correlation society. Putting them together, however, robs any one of them of a privilege over the others; thus the potentially exclusive inwardness of "formation1' is corrected by an exterior Ilcorrelation.ll Second, together they have a considerably more general power over different sorts of partic- ulars. What has often been the problem with the sociology of knowledge is its reliance upon a quite circumscribed Western and industrial social par- adigm; anything beyond that setting seems to resist the method. Foucault's criteria have a closer internal discipline and a wider general sweep than that. Third, in emphasizing the detailed complications of these criteria Foucault makes them -- from the standpoint of an historian -- able demonstrably to separate words from things, to make it clear once and for all that words op- erate with lawsof their own. What is unexceptionably regular in a discourse is, from a "natural" point of view, completely perverse, even unnatural. Discursivity is a mutual refusal: of nature by language, and of language by nature. Language admits things as things of language. A wil l to truth is above all a will to place things in language, which In the on-going discipline of a discourse is a placing we might justifiably call "knowledge.'l Once-of the discourse, an object occupies a space prepared for it -- as Freud's Un- conscious climaxes a history of psychological probing -- but in SO doing i t must of necessity displace, or at least dislocate, other objects. Hence there

is a double violence: of language to things, and of one language to another,

-- --

--

and all this takes place as regularly as the discourse proceeds. Every utterance is an event that asymetrically covers other utterances. Insofar as the covering goes on habitually and repetitively, i t is also re-covery, in a dual way: once again obscuring other events by its presence, and bringing up the discourse to a new level of activity.

No event can long remain an event. Foucaultls analysis wishes to describe the curve of motion that goes from an utterance occurring as a singular irruption, to utterance as variation within discourse. The same curve would describe the relations between one discourse and the others, and one BpistkmS to other 6pist6m$s, each singularity assimilated to a larger order with more or less violence; this is how the intransigent aleatory character of an event is reduced, although never destroyed completely. The verb tense most capable of conveying the movement from irregularity to regularity is the present i n f i n i t i ~ e , ~ ~ event to for in i t the process from -eventuality via actuality can be rendered faithfully. The repetitiveness of the process does away with originality entirely as seriality does away with unity, and each event in its violent displacement of a prior event does away with creation. And since there is no fore-ordained, a priori route for the discourse to travel, a route legislated from outside it, the order of utterance, discourse, and BpistBmk bears no resemblance to the traditionally concentric circles of self, world and God, which are held together dynastically by three types of time (human, natural, divine) and by three types of continuity, all paternally guaranteed by God the father.45 The order of discourse is maintained by legislated accident, by chance. . . Le pres- 'I.

ent est un coup de d6s. . . . Le present comme revenir de la diffe'rence, comme r6p6tition se disant de la diff6rence affirme une fois le tout du hasard. "46

Most theories are so constituted as to be able to compel a large number of different individual details into a smaller set of general principles, this is true, for example, of the theory of generative grammar. The odd, distinctive quality of ~oucault 's theory, as I have just described it, is that his general principles are designed to illuminate a large number of ~_e-

petitive phenomena that are continuously appearing with such disconcert- ing randomness as to seem chaotic. In the mindlessness of their repetition, and in the unmotivated gratuitousness of their patterns, they cannot -- and perhaps should not -- correspond to or fulfil l a pre-established law, need, or desire. Except, one supposes, those of repetition and chance, although I doubt that my vocabulary can go beyond Foucault's in explaining these rather terminal conceptions. I suspect that Foucault is simultaneously addressing the Nietzschean idea of Eternal Recurrence and the disconcert- ing, surprising effect of Freud's will to repeat, in its irrationality; he takes from the former the idea of exact repetition and from the latter the trau-

--

-- -

matic precision of one exactly defined event that gets repeated down to

its last detail. Therefore according to Deleuze ~oucau l t ' s achievement 11 1c est d'avoir dgcouvert et arpentd cette terre inconnue o'u une forme l i t t k

raire, une phrase quotidienne, un non-sens schizpphrgnique, etc., sont Bga-A-

lementdes dnoncks, pourtant sans commune mesure, sans aucune rkduction ni equivalence discursive. Et c'est ce point qui nlavait jamais e'td atteint, par les logiciens, les formalistes, ou les interpr8tes.1'47

4. A principle of exteriority:

. . . ne pas aller du discours vers son noyau int6rieur et cachg, vers le coeur d'une pensge ou d'une signification qui se manifesteraient en lui; mais 3 partir du discours l u i - m h e , de son apparition et de sa r&gularit&, aller vers ce qui donne lieu 3 la s6rie algatoire de ces e've'nements et qui en fixe les b o r n e ~ . ~ ~

Nietzsche, Mallarm&, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski are cited by Foucault for having deciphered a new form of experience -- laE n -s6ede dehors -- already implanted proleptically in modern culture by Hijld- erlin and de ~ a d e . ~ ~ I t i s the experience of a kind of transcendental home- lessness (~ukacs's phrase is apt indeed). This state i s the result of discover- ingan absolute incompatibility between the realm of totality and the realm of personal interiority, or subjectivity. Holderlin and de Sade personify an extremism so complete in its heedless articulation of impossible desires as to exclude the possibility of accommodating one man's inner self to it. Their works deliver naked desire, totally unconditioned by subjectivity, and without contingency: it is a pure serialism unravelling itself, for i t s own sake. This is paradoxical, for how then can men think like Holderlin and de Sade and still retain some semblance of their subjectivity? Foucault argues that the price both writers paid for their daring was virtually to have alienated themselves into unreason; the sign of their exteriority to social discourse was their madness, their having turned themselves inside out onto the public domain of their work. With a later generation of writers, for whom only language (and not society) was the space of their activity, exteriority is no longer an inverted interiority, but the realm of all knowledge. This freedom of knowledge from subjectivity is posited at the moment that knowledge is understood as a function not of truth, but of a statement: the "I think" is worked against by the "I speak.'' The former leads to interiority, the traditional place of truth, the latter to exteriority. Language as being-for-itself stands forth only when subjectivity is engulfed.50

Exteriority also meansan estrangement from sense -- and Foucault

is no more justified than he is now in the use of his theatrical metaphor. Estrangement is dislocation, an effect interestingly attained by ~recht 's plays in putting into relief the disparity between audience and message. Similarly, society puts madness outside itself; exteriority socially speaking is the displacement of sense o~twards -- paranoia.51 Ordinarily we discover meaning by claiming sense from the outside world and pressing i t into ser- vice inwards. The opposite process exhausts the self by constituting an--other place, another history, another thought beyond the self, and grad- ually more powerful, because stable and overt, than it.52 Discourse is precisely this exteriority given form, just as madness in Western society has been the exteriorization and confinement in asylums, of a hidden silent self. The exteriority of discourse enables the possibility of its existence and of knowledge but does not guarantee its truth. Exterioritv finally is the dispersion, the systematic dissociation, of the unified truth of interior- i tv amidst the ordered discursivity of all knowledge.

". . . On peut dire que le savoir, comme champ d'historicitk 05 apparaissent les sciences, est libre de toute activite constituante, affranchi de toute re'f6rence 3 une origine ou ?I une tel6ologie historico-transcendent- ale, de'tach'e de tout appui sur une subjectivite' f ~ n d a t r i c e . " ~ ~ Apart from its assertiveness, the most notable thing about this definition of knowledge i s that it is a series of denials. Knowledge is not constitutive of anything, can be referred neither to an origin nor to a w,is detached from any particular subjectivity. In a certain sense then, knowledge is epistemolog- ically neutral, not value-free but saturated with all values; perhaps i t would be better to say that knowledge not anything, but is rather the possibil- i ty of everything we know. The enormous complexity of Foucault's definitions -- the rules, criteria, function, axes, etc. -- i s that they continually force the mind from habitual processes to unusual ones whose direction and whose motivation are only minimally apparent.54 Consider, for example, Foucault's refusal to think in terms of "author" and "work." These are ready-made continuities he will do everything in his power to avoid using. Thus, a writer's name i s a complex event, his work a segment of the archive bound together by "d iscur~ iv i t~" whose rules evolve a collection of semantic elements, and a collection of operative strategies of getting things said.

All of ~oucault 's work is an attempt to make the history and indeed the experience of knowledge something as specifically ordered as "nature' has become for modern physics or chemistry. The setting of this order is the library. Nevertheless I think i t is essential to say that far from

being -- as they appear -- inhuman the "library" and the "archive" in ~oucaul t 's project serve a particularly humanizing purpose. Cer-tainly a library is man-made even if as a collection of discrete entities it cannot be contained in any one man's mind or experience. Still it i s the library's use for a finite purpose which can be subordinated to a human motive, just as a speech act is humanly motivated whereas a language i s not. Have the proliferations of knowledge finally left the human subject so completely behind, or i s there some method bringing subjectivity up to the chailenge of all knowledge?

With the mythological analyses of Barthes and Lkvi-Strauss, Fou- cault's archeologies have had the effect of laying bare a logic inherent in knowledge but no longer dependent upon the manipulation of a constantly intervening subject. In all three cases this is a logic inhabiting the spaces between the object of thought, but only Foucault among the three has attempted to characterize thought as radically mixed up with chance, discontinuity and materiality, albeit the ones of languace in use. I quoted ~eleuze's summary of what this means: what I did not then underscore was his use of the phrase "une terre inconnue.'' Such a description raises the question of whether Foucault has invented a new realm of speculation, or whether he has rediscovered a long present realm. Is this place the result of a return, or a reactualization, or an i n ~ e n t i o n ? ~ ~ In the terms of Fou- cault'sown methodological attitude each of the three designations is appli- cable depending on one's epistemological perspective. Thus archeology i s a return to Nietzschean critique and genealogy, a re-actualization of a proper way of doing the history of science, consciousness, concepts, and ideas, and then also a polemical invention to harass establishment historians or philosophers.

Yet in this connection the obviously crucial significance to Fou- cault of Borges cannot be overlooked. I suppose that were he to be asked about why Borges matters to him, Foucault would point to the frequent appearance together in Ficciones of terrifically precise detail, inescapably precise repetition, sly duplicity, interestingly monotonous revelation, and a totally missing scheme of continuity linking details together. Al l these do not result in a conversion for the reader, just as it is unlikely that any of ~oucau l t ' s readers will suddenly have his world-view altered even if, quite literally, his mind will change. ~oucau l t ' s imaginative effect,57 however, is noticeable, and it overrules any desire for getting hold of a method in his writing that one can "apply," I n overruling the wish for an applic- able method (this i s the neutralization I mentioned at the outset) an intellectual occurrence takes place. with a directness we normally associate not with words meaping something. hut ,with words sayinclsomething. In read- ing Foucault, thisevent is the result in his writing of having induced thought

to happen, without the determining offices of books, authors, or physical perception, except as accidents of thought, secondary attributes of it. Therefore the prototype of such activity would be ~oussel 's language, which always means ''something else."58 But t o go on and detail this something else i s to make the subversion of our customary mental furni- ture into an exact science, a stylized theatricality of dissociation which i s technically as well as rationally plotted from moment to moment. Hous-ing all this in prose is rather like taking a library very seriously, as an in- credible peculiarity and a very powerful adjunct to the history of human effort. The paradox of Foucault is how such severity, learning and system as his -- quite without dishonesty and trickiness -- are maintained with such wisdom and style: there are hardly any scholarly enemies he attacks and no obstacles he avoids.59 The bookish fragments that Joyce, Eliot, and M.allarm6 wove together in their work return in Foucault, but as postmod- ern denizens of a wide space that i s very generously impersonal, intellect- ually comprehended for all i t s discontinuities, and far from being an un- heroic field of verbal action.

Columbia University

NOTES

1. In James Joyce: Common Sense and Beyond (New York: Random House, 19661, p. 151, Robert M. Adams glosses this passage as follows: h he historic catastrophe which ends the chapter [Cyclops] i s a specially complex and layered event. I t is, of course, the climax of the episode's gigantism; on a semi-serious level, i t is also the catastrophe, the thunderclap, which brings one cycle of history to an end and inaugurates another (Bloom is blown out of central Dublin . . . while most of the other characters present are exploded clean out of the novel). The man who picks up the pieces and gets a new cycle going again is rather a cycle himself. He i s called His Royal Highness rear admiral the right honourable Sir Hercules Hannibal Habeas Corpus Anderson, and there follows a series of 19 titles of honor . . . . In addition, Hercules is a Greek name, Hannibal a Sem-itic one (in English i t would translate to John Bull), Habeas Corpus is a Roman expression (implying "YOU may have my body1'), and Anderson (from German e r : other as well as Greek andros: man) implies that he IS the Son of Man, the sacred foundling (Moses, Oed- ipus, Romulus and Remus, Christ) from whom emerging civilizations have traditionally sprung.''

2. Another monograph, Maladie rnentale et psychologie(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), appeared much earlier and was re- published in 1966. Its second part adumbrates ~oucau l t ' s later books. The six books are: Folie et Dkraison: Histoire de la folie 'a 1 ' 2 ~ eclass-

-ique (Paris: Plon, 1961) -- t r . by Richard Howard (of an abridgement) as Madness and Civiliz*: A History of Insanity in the Age of Rea-

-son (New York: Random House, 1965); Naissance de la clinique: Une Arch6ologie du regard m6dical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard, 1963); Les Mots et les chosess: Une Arch6ologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Galli- mard, 1966) -- tr. as The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971); ~ ' ~ r c h 6 o l o ~ i e (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); du savoir L1Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971 ) . A selective list of Fou- cault's essays is: "Le I\lon du p6re,'' Critique, 178 (March 19621, 195-209; "Le Langage 'a l ' infini," Tel Ouel, 15 (Autumn, 1963),44- 53; "~re'face A la transgression," Critique, 195-196 (August-Septem- her 1963), 751-69; "~istance, Aspect, origine,ll Critique, 198 (Nov- ember 1963), 931-45,"La Prose d 1 ~ c t 8 o n , " La Nouvelle Revue Fran- &, 135 (March 1, 19641, 444-59; "Le Langage de l'espace," x--ique, 203 (Apri l 1964), 378--82; "La Pensee du dehors," Critique, 229 (June 1966), 523-46; "~ ie t rsche, Marx, Freud," Nietzsche

(Paris: Minuit, 1967), pp. 183-92; I I R ~ ~ o n s e 'a une q u e s t i o n , " ~ t , No. 5 (May 1968), pp. 850-74; lt~Qponse au Cercle dlepistemologie,ll Cahiers pour ltanalyse, 9 (Summer 19681, 9-40; "~u'est-ce qutun auteur?" Bulletin de la Societ6 franqaise de Philosophie, 63rd Year, No. 3 (July-September 1969). pp. 75-95; heatru rum ~hi loso~hicum," Critique, 282 (November 1970), 885-908; "~ietzsche, la ge'nc?alogie, l'histoire,ll Hommage 2 Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), pp. 145-72. The literature on Foucault is not extensive. In French there are four essential review-articles on limited aspects of his work: Roland Barthes, l l ~ e Part et dtautre,l1 in Essais Critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), pp. 167-74; Jacques Derrida, ltcogito et histoire de la folie," in ~ ' ~ c r i t u r e et la difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 51-97; Georges Canguihelm, " ~ o r t de l'homme ou epui-sement du cogito?'' Critique, 242 (July 19671, 599-618; Gilles De- leuze, " ~ n Nouvel archiviste,ll Critique, 274 (March 19701, 195-209. In English the present author has treated Foucault in the general context of structuralist thought -- a context Foucault does not especially like (even though he is not himself a structuralist, Foucault has many things in common with structuralists) -- in "~becedarium Cul- turae: Structuralism, Absence, writing,'' in John K. Simon, ed., Mod-ern French Criticism: From Proust and Valery to Structuralism (chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 19721, pp. 341-92. The bibliographical supplement of that essay lists additional items on Foucault in both French and English. Although there are certain resemblances between Foucault and both Arthur Lovejoy and Kenneth Burke, the differences on the whole are more interesting.

3. he historical sense . . . must only be the acuity of a view that distinguishes, distributes, disperses, allows free play to deviations and limits -- a kind of view that dissociates, is capable of dissociating itself. and is capable of erasing the unity of that human being who is supposed to carry the view in a sovereign manner towards his past." Foucault, Il~ietzsche, la ge'ne'alogie, l'histoire," p. 159.

4. Deleuze, l l ~ n nouvel archiviste," pp. 198-200. 5. ' 'what I shall call an archive is neither the totality of texts which a

civilization has preserved, nor the ensemble of traces which have been saved . . . after its disasters, but the play of rules which in a cul-ture determine the appearance and the disappearance of utterances, their paradoxical existence as events and as things. To analyze facts of discourse in the general element of the archive is not to consider them as documents (which have a hidden meaning, o r . . . a rule of construction), but as monuments; and this without reference to any geological metaphor, without assigning them any origin, without the

least gesture towards a beginning, an e e -- not these things, but t o do instead what, according to the playful prerogatives of etymology, would be something like an archeology." Foucault, ' ' ~ k ~ o n s e au Cercle d'epistemologie," p. 19. For the connection between archive and 6nonc6 (which I translate as utterance, although speech-act or statement are cognates; I have used utterance to distinguish enonce' from &onciation -- statement -- and ace &I langage speech-act), see ~ ' ~ r c h 6 o l o ~ i e -- du savoir,

pp. 105-73. In " u n Nouvel archiviste,' pp. 195-98, Deleuze comments helpfully on the rather special characteristics of an e'nonce', which is not simply anything said, but a status achieved at a time and somewhere by what i s said. Foucault i s clearly in accord with much of ~e leure ls Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), and especially "de 116v6nement," pp. 174-79. For the notion of theater as i t is used in the analysis of 6criture see Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 19671, pp. 428-41. And see the same work, passim, on the connection between Bcriture and representation. ~ h ; literature on @wi th its association in metaphysics, cosmology and &--ture is extensive, but Derrida i s also a source, as is Deleuze. I t i s im-portant to remember that Foucault makes a distinction between the theater as space and the theater as place: his theater is the former, not the latter. For the way he traces this concept t o Nietzschets thought see t '~ ietzsche, la gknkalogie, l'histoiret' and the discussion there of Herkunft and Entstehung. See also note 27 below. For the political relationship between &6nement and gcriture there i s Barthes, " ~ ' ~ c r i t u r ede l16v6nement," Communications, No. 12 (1968), pp. 108-1 2.

6. The literature on the loss of the subject is hugely varied. In English, Lionel ~ r i l l i n ~ ' s and the Modern ~nconscious," Corn- ' ' ~ u t h e n t i c i t ~ mentary, 52 (September 19711, 39-50, and Wylie sypherls Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York: Vintage Books, 1962) are two recent statements of note. In French there are Claude Le'vi-Strauss, La Pense'e sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962), and Mytholo- giques: Le Cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964), especially pp. 1-40; Jacques Lacan, m s (Paris: Seuil, 1967); and generally in works by Roland Barthes. In addition to such arguments as these there i s Fou-cault's objection that the subject does not do justice to,and analytic- ally cannot cope with, the complex density of discourse. See The Order of Things, p, xiii.

7. h heat rum ~h i loso~hicurn , ' 'pp. 885-90. 8. " ln order for the kpistCmb of the classical age to have appeared as

object it was necessary to situate oneself a t the point where, part-

--

icipating in the 19th century e'pistgme, one was far enough away from the classical 6pist6me's birth to see the rupture with the 18th century, and near enough to imagine that one was going to &e an-other rupture, one after which Man, as formerly Order, would appear as an object.'' Cauguihelm, " ~ o r t de l'homme ou Cpuisement du cogito?" p. 61 1.

9. Other critics who have drawn attention to this process of "creative" dissociation are . . DD.. .Barthes in Essais Critiaues, 213-20; Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971). pp. 45-61; Morse Peckham, an's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965); and Maurice Blanchot, ~ ' ~ s ~ a c e Cf.littgraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). also these comments: "I have not the gift of regular sowing and reap- ing, year by year, in one particular field. Like a brush-fire, my mind burns its way into territory which may sometimes prove unexplored; sometimes these excursion-s prove fertile, and I snatch at a harvest or two, leaving devastation behind me.'' L6vi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1964). p. 56. a he word scorching has a peculiar significance for my superstitious mind not so much because of any quality or merit in the writing itself as for the fact that the progress of the book is in fact like the progress of some sandblast. As soon as I mention or include any person in it I hear of his or her death or departure 01misfortune: and each successive episode, deal- ing with some province of artistic culture (rhetoric or music or dialectic), leaves behind i t a burnt up field." James Joyce, Letters, ed. by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957) pp. 128-29. No contemporary writer has made more of the notions of creative dissociation, waste, transgression than Georges Bataille; see his Sur Nietzsche, volont6 de chance (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) and La Litte'rature et le

-ma1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). 10. " l t involves risking the destruction of the subject of knowledge in

the infinitely deployed will to knowledge. 'I 'I

Foucault, Nietzsche, le g6n6alogie, l'histoire," p. 172. 1 have used knowledge for&r here and elsewhere LO register the difference in English between connais-

-sance, or anything we know, and s z r , or learning. Savoir implies certain conditions for knowledge, while connaissance does not. See note 53.

11. A) 'I. . . the philosophy of the event must move in whatat first glance appears to be a paradoxical direction: to-wards a materialism of the incorporeal."

B . . i t is necessary to elaborate -- quite outside philos- 'I.

ophiesof a subject or of time -- a theory of discontinuous systematizations." ' lone must accept the introduction of chance as a category in the production of events, for in that production one still feels the absence of a theory permitting us to think the relations between chance and thought." Foucault, ~ ' 0 r d r e du discours, pp. 60, 61.

12. "chance, discontinuity, materiality.'' Ibid., p. 61. 13. Ibid., pp. 49-53. 14. ~oucau l t ' s word is renversement, literally overturning. However, I

have chosen reversibility because it contains the idea of reversing and with it the suggestion of a continually practised action. 'I. . . where-ever according to tradition one believes the source of discourses are to be found, the principle of their increase and of their continuity, in those figures that appear to play a positive role, such as those of the author, of a discipline, or of a will -- instead of all that one ought instead to see the active negativity of something cut of f , rarefied, into and by discourse." Ibid., p. 54.

15. Some of the adumbrations of discours are to be found in Edmund Ortigues, Le Discours et le symbole (Paris: Aubier, 1962); Emile Ben- veniste, Problemes de linguistique g6ngrale (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) -- tr. by Mary E. Meek as Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables: Univ. o f Miami Press, 1971); Roland Barthes, "TO Write: an Intransitive v e r b ? ' in Richard Macksey, Eugenio Donato, eds., The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 19701, pp. 134-45; in the same volume, Jacques Derrida, ''structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human ~ciences," pp. 247-65; Gerard Genette, "~ront ibres du recit," in Figures l l (Paris: Seuil, 19691, pp. 49-69. Discours i s linked to conceptions of gcriture, for which the works of Barthes are preeminently important, as is Brice parain's Recherches sur la nature et les fonctions du langage (Paris: Gallimard, 1942). Later developments in the theory of Qcriture -- found in books and essays by Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristera and the Tel Quel group -- as well as by Foucault, Barthes and Derrida -- are sketched in Leon Roudiez, " ~ e s Tendances actuelles de 1'6criture: presentation et bib- liographie," French Review, 45 (December 1971 ), 321-32.

16. Benveniste, E l e m s in General Linguistics, pp. 206-07. 17. I bid., pp. 208-09. 18. Lacan, Ecrits, p. 249. See also his presentation to a new French tran-

slation by Paul Duquenne of ~chreber's memoirs in Les Cahiers pour l l~nalyse, 5 (November-December 1966). 69-72.

19. L1Ordre du discours, pp. 19-2 1. 20. Naissance de la cliniqueis a detailed examination of the development

and formation of clinical discourse from the middle of the eighteenth century to about the 1820's. hat there are systems of rarefaction does not also mean that be-

neath or beyond them a great unlimited discourse has reigned, silently and continuously, which is withheld and repressed by these systems, and which i t is our task to bring to light, thereby restoring speech to and in it. One must not imagine an unsaid speech or unthought thought that travel through the world and are entwined with all the world's forms and events, and which it is our task finally to articulate or think. Discourses have to be treated as discontinuous practical- ities that cross each other, are sometimes juxtaposed with each other, but just as often exclude and ignore each other." L1Ordre du discours, pp. 54-55. Foucault, heatru rum philosophicum," p. 899. Foucault, "Le Langage B l'infini," p. 53. For another reflection on some of ~ o r ~ e s l s ideas of literature, the library, and language see Genette, " L 1 ~ t o p i e littGraire," in Figures I (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 123-32. Cf. ~oucault 's account of Deleuze in heatru rum ~hiloso~hicl;m," and also Deleuze, Difference et r6p6tition (Paris: Presses Universi- taires de France, 1968). There is, I think, an important correspondence between the idea of interdiscursive repetition in Foucault and Deleuze, and the attention paid in rather recent criticism (e.g. in the work of Hugh Kenner and Northrop Frye) to the echoic characteristics of modernist writing. Foucault, ' ' ~ 6 ~ o n s e a une question," p. 859. Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 306-07. Foucault, "~ietzsche, la ge'nkalogie, l'histoire," p. 156. See also L1~rch6010giedu savoir, pp. 203-04. " l t is quite possible that the gods sent disasters to beset men so that man might then be able to tell of them: in this possibility speech finds its infinite resourcef~lness.~~ "Le Langage 5 llinfini," p. 44. l ' ln western culture to write has meant a t the outset to place oneself in the virtual space of self-representation and doubleness; since writing signifies speech and not a thing, the linguistic work has done no more than to move forward more deeply into that impalpable thick- ness of a mirror, to stir up that double of a double which is writing, to discover an infinite possibility and impossibility, to follow after speech indefinitely, and maintain i t beyond the death that condemns it, and to liberate the streaming of a murmur. This presence o f

speech repeated in writing doubtless gives an ontological status to what we call a work, a status unknown to those cultures in which when one writes it i s the thing itself that gets designated -- bodily and visibly, and obstinately inaccessible to time.'' Ibid., pp. 45-46. Foucault, " ~ e Langage de llespace," p. 378. 'I. . . deviation, distance, intermediation, dispersion, fragmentation, difference.'' I bid., p. 378. he attribute of heroism passed from the hero to the one who por-

trayed him a t the very moment that western culture itself became a world of representations.ll Foucault, "Le Non-du p$re," p. 199. P. 189. Cf. "Le Nan du p8re,'' p. 205, for an account -- based on Lacan and Melanie Klein -- of the father's place in the Oedipal tr i- angle, and his role in bringing together conceptions of space, law, and language for the child. "~ietzsche, Freud, ~ a r x , " pp. 184-85. I bid., p. 183. "A repeated circling about of being around indifference.

I 1 I 1Theat-

rum ~h i loso~hicum," p. 901. " [ A principled decision] not to resolve discourse into a set of pre- ordained significations; not to imagine to oneself that the world turns to us a readable face that we need only decipher simply; the world is not an accessory to our knowledges; there is no prediscursive providence that disposes things our way. One must conceive discourse as a violence we do to things, or in any case, a practicality we impose on them; and i t i s in that practicality that the events of a discourse f ind the principle of their regularity." L1Ordre du discours, p. 55. Here too there i s a large modern literature on the way in which discourse cannot be resolved easily into such concepts as "author" or "subject." For alternative arguments on the very active but circumscribed role the concept of "authorll plays see Pierre Macherey, Pour une thkorie de la production littkraire (Paris: Maspero, 1966); Walter Benjamin, " ~ e r Autor als ~roduzent," in Versuche iiber Brecht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), pp. 95-116; Roland Barthes, "~cr ivains et dcrivants," in Essais Critiques, pp. 147-54. The Order of Things, p. 209. I bid., p. 209. I bid., pp. 305-06. Foucault, "Oulest-ce qu'un auteur,'' passim. L1Ordre du discours, pp. 11-21. See the Foreword specially written by Foucault for The Order of Things, p. x i : "what I would like to do, however, is to reveal a pos--itive unconscious of knowledge.''

heatru rum ~ h i l o s o ~ h i c u m , ~ ~p. 893. I bid., p. 893. he present is a throw of the dice . . . . The present as return of

difference, as repetition styling itself as difference, affirms once for all the totality of chance." Ibid., p. 906. ~oucault 's achievement ''is to have discovered and surveyed that unknown realm where a literary form, an everyday sentence, an item of schizophrenic non-sense, etc., are equally utterances, without however having anything in common with each other, nor anything to which they are all reducible, nor any discursive equivalence with each other. And i t is this point to which neither logicians, nor form- alists, nor Deleuze, " ~ n interpreters have ever reached.'' Nouvel archiviste," p. 208. ". . . not a movement from the discourse to its internal and hidden nucleus, to the heart of thoughts or meaning that are made manifest in the discourse; but with reference to the discourse, in its actual appearance and its regularity, a movement instead towards the discourse's external conditions of possibility, towards that which enables the aleatorv series of discursive events. and which determines limits." L1Ordre du discours, p. 55. In this connection see the in- vestigative attitudes and the findings of the Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria in his T,he Mind of a Mnemonist, tr. Lynn Solotaroff (New York: Basic Books, 1968). Foucault, "La Pensee du dehors," p. 525-27. I bid., p. 525. See note 18 above. Canguihelm, " ~ o r t de l1homme ou Bpuisement du cogito?ll p. 607.

'lone can say that as a field of historicity on which the sciences appear, knowledge is free of any constitutive activity, liberated from any references backwards to an origin or forwards to an historical or transcendental teleology, and detached from any support or ground in subjectivity." Foucault, l l~kponse au Cercle d1epistemologie,l1 p. 40. I t is impossible in English to render the distinction Foucault makes between connaissance and savoir, except to say that his "archeology" deals with the latter, which unlike connaissance is less a matter of the contents of knowledge than conditions for and of it. See note 10 above. The same complexity, tending to diffuseness, is true in structuralist methodological definitions and classifications. This is an important issue requiring full analysis, but suffice i t here to say that the almost bewildering proliferation of rules and definitions is linked more to methodological self-classification -- and "scientific1 discipline -- than

to application. 55. The problems of what a model is and what human is are of course

very involved. I use both human (or inhuman) and model here in a very simple-minded way. This way, however, does not reflect Fou- cault's attitudes necessarily, nor his interests, especiall\/ since, because of Les Mots et les choses, he has been identified as the philosopher of the Death of Man.

56. See "Oulest ce qulun auteur," pp. 92-93 for specific differences drawn by Foucault between "rediscovery,

I 1 I'reactualization,'' and

I I I I return.

57. Throughout this essay I have intended llimaginative'' r o t in the vague sense of vague inventing, but rather in the sense of representing, re- conceiving. I imply reflection and originality together, but kept within the material of discourse, as Foucault describes it.

58. Foucault, Raymond Roussel, p. 210. 59. ~oucault 's t i f f with George Steiner conducted in the pages of D&-

-critics is an exception. Otherwise, he i s an unfailingly careful discus- sant, i f the pages of discussion recorded after his talk are accurate evidence.

(a) Said Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination

Documents

Transcript of (a) Said Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination