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Modernist misapprehensionsof Foucault's aestheticsJon Simons aa Lecturer in Critical Theory , University ofNottinghamPublished online: 17 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Jon Simons (2000) Modernist misapprehensions of Foucault'saesthetics, Cultural Values, 4:1, 40-57, DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367185

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Cultural Values ISSN 1362-5179Volume 4 Number 1 2000 pp. 40-57

Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault'sAesthetics

Jon SimonsUniversity of Nottingham

Abstract. Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and JrgenHabermas, accuse Foucault of being an 'aestheticist'. As such, Foucaultfails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible bymodernity's rationalization, which offers better resources foremancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues thatsuch criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions ofaesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding thatFoucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorizationof transgression, not least because of his interest in modernist, avant-garde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall,Foucault's interest in avant-garde aesthetics is not modernist in thesense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernistillustration of the absence of foundations for representation andlanguage, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limitingconditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light asboth contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developedin his early analyses of avant-garde art and then expanded to coversubjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophicalcritical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant-garde art as a criticalmode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present.

Introduction

Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jrgen Habermas,accuse Foucault of being an 'aestheticist'. By this they mean thatFoucault makes an exaggerated and illegitimate appeal to one ofmodernity's marginalized value spheres as a reaction against therepressive consequences of modernity. Foucault's aestheticism is not oneof art for art's sake in which art is considered a higher reality aloof fromfallen reality. Rather, his is a Nietzschean pan-aestheticism that 'imposesthe aesthetic attitude on all spheres of life ... [and] refuses to respect theseparate "inner logics" in differentiated realms of human cognition, i.e.,

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Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault's Aesthetics 41

science, morality, and art' (Wolin, 1986, p.73). In particular, Megillargues that Foucault fails to distinguish between discourse and reality(or imagination and cognition); and Habermas argues that Foucault failsto realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible bymodernity's rationalization, or differentiation of the value spheres,which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerousaestheticizations.

Much of the negative discussion about Foucault's aestheticismfocuses on his later work on 'arts of the self and aesthetics of existence.For example, according to Terry Eagleton (1990) Foucault's self-referential arts of the self are models of autonomous revolt againstsubjection that follow the autotelic logic of aesthetics. But Foucault'saestheticization of power as autonomous and self-referential,exemplified by Greek aesthetics of existence, precludes any model ofsociety by celebrating nothing more than individual style (pp. 390-3). InEagleton's terms, Foucault simply asserts the ideological autonomoussubject of bourgeois aesthetic modernism. Wolin (1986) also argues that:'Only with Foucault's later work ... does aesthetic decisionism becomethe dominant leitmotif (p. 79). Greek aesthetics of existence, with theirrelative freedom from normalization and emphasis instead on stylisticcriteria as a basis for ethics, are adopted by Foucault as a positive model.Similarly, Baudelaire shows Foucault how 'art passes over into the sphereof life' (p. 82). However, 'once an aestheticist outlook becomes the soledeterminant of life', no other constraints on action are acknowledged.Hence, 'Foucault's standpoint favors either an attitude of narcissisticself-absorption or one of outwardly directed, aggressive self-aggrandizement' (p. 85).

Such criticisms unfortunately overlook, for the most part, Foucault'searlier work on modernist art, which would probably the best source forevidence of his modernist aestheticism, as Wolin (1986, p. 73) observes.Attention to this earlier work shows that it was in that context thatFoucault's critical ethos developed. The transgressive stance thatunderlies his later work, including his notion of aesthetics of existence,emerges from his critical relation to modernist art which is paraestheticrather than aestheticist (Carroll, 1987). Revisiting Foucault's writing onthe avant-garde not only brings to light the continuity of Foucault'scritical approach, but also rebuts the accusations of aestheticism. Criticswho make such charges mistakenly deploy only certain modernistnotions of aesthetics against Foucault, ones which centre on art as anautonomous value sphere of culture.

There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal tosuch conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, notleast because of his interest in modernist, avant-garde writers and artistssuch as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avant-garde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics.

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42 Jon Simons

Even if he does sometimes mistake transgression of limits for theirtranscendence, Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of theabsence of foundations for representation and language. The limitingconditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light asboth contingent (as current limits are not the only possible ones) yetnecessary (as some limits or rules of language are required). I argue thatFoucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avant-garde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity in his laterphilosophical critical ethos of modernity. Closer attention to these earliercritical analyses should moderate the critics' comments. Rather thanunderstanding modernist art as a realm of freedom without limitations,as either an escape from modernity or a model for its emancipation,Foucault uses avant-garde art as a critical tool, as a mode of criticalreflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present. While his laterwork remains indebted to the critical approach developed in hisanalyses of the avant-garde, Foucault is not an 'aestheticist' in the wayhis critics suggest.

Modernist Critiques of Foucault's Aesthetics

Alan MegillMegill (1985) places Foucault within an aestheticist critique of theEnlightenment which rejects the Kantian separation of the practical,theoretical and aesthetic realms. Such 'modernist Romantics' have 'atendency to see "art" or "language" or "discourse" or "text" asconstituting the primary realm of human experience' (p. 2). Foucault isthus said to exploit the opening left by Kant when he established theautonomy of aesthetic judgement in its assessments of a 'purposivenesswithout purpose', unconstrained by moral purpose or sensual pleasure.1

Megill's basic argument with Foucault is that he produces art ratherthan truth. He places considerable emphasis on Foucault's statementthat:

I have never written anything but fictions ... It seems to me that thepossibility exists for fiction to function in truth ... for a fictional discourseto induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that true discourseengenders or 'manufactures' something that does not as yet exist.(Foucault, 1980, p.193)

So, Megill says, Foucault writes 'useful myths ... that will disorder order... break up what is extant ... turn the present into the past'. Or, as heputs it more blatantly, 'Foucault is engaging in a legitimate rhetoricaltactic, telling us lies about the past in order to open our eyes to the

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Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault's Aesthetics 43

reality of the present'. Foucault's tactic is sensible, as 'sometimes logicaland historical correctness may contribute to this aim [of] ... changing theway things are ... but it is equally plausible that they may not' (Megill,1985, pp. 235, 244, 245). Rhetoric has force as a form of prophecy,expressing potentiality, which in Foucault's case is a potential to beother than what we are.

Megill claims that 'Foucault is viewing the world as if it werediscourse ... if the world is discursive, the whole of the extant order isdiscursive' (p. 238). This is said to follow from Foucault's aestheticistoutlook. The aestheticist ploy is to turn the confinement of the aestheticrealm in the margins of the discursive formation and human experience,into an attempt to dominate the other value spheres. It is a strategicrealignment within the modern episteme. Megill's objections to theaestheticist approach mostly appear in his critique of Nietzsche.According to Megill, Nietzsche did not merely elevate the value of theaesthetic above morality and science, but claimed that the latter weredisguised versions of the former. Knowledge expresses a will tofalsification which is necessary as we could not act in the world if wedid not conceptualise it somehow. All truth is illusion. The powerful arethose who have the creative will to make their myth work, to make itreal. The world is a work of art that gives birth to itself. Megill arguesthat the same ontological role ascribed to art or myth in Nietzsche isgiven to language/discourse by Foucault.

In The Order of Things ... both subject and object disappear; here, finally,the world is conceived as nothing but discourse ... For Foucault there areno firm foundations, no original or transcendental signified to which allsignifiers can ultimately refer, (pp. 203-4, p. 211)

Megill's basic point is that there is no use in pretending it is discoursethat creates the world because we cannot avoid confronting the harshreality that discourse does not change. 'One can call everything 'illusion'... 'discourse' or 'text'. But this does not abolish the distinction between,say, an interpretation of being run over by a truck and the experienceitself (p. 42).

Having drawn an absolute distinction between discourse and reality,Megill re-enacts the Kantian confinement of art to a limited sphere.'There is one context ... in which the position embraced by Nietzscheand Foucault makes sense: the aesthetic context... [where] we engage inthe willing suspension of disbelief (p. 42). Megill also mentions the senseof loss involved in a turn to aesthetics, a sense of loss felt first by theRomantics which they ascribed to the exclusion of spirit, imaginationand art by Reason. Central to Foucault's aestheticism is a sense of loss;that the creative experience of the aesthetic realm has been marginalizedat great cost to humanity. For example, Foucault wrote that certain

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experiences, such as madness, are only available to us now throughliterature. In principle, Megill also recognises the existence andlegitimacy of this excluded realm, but only within prescribedboundaries. The aesthetic must be limited because even if we were toaccept Nietzsche's unprovable and unfalsifiable ontological claim, themost we can do is to 'visit the aesthetic world, we cannot live in it, for itutterly lacks the structures necessary for human social life. It ignores,that is, the natural and social needs of humankind for the unconstrainedfreedom of the artist' (p. 102). These needs are the truck Foucault wouldabolish with the stroke of his pen but which will hit him anyway.

Megill draws a sharp differentiation between discourse and reality,interpretation and experience, and hence the aesthetic realm and the realhuman world. His realist commitments are very problematic, becauseMegill confuses a crucial distinction between the occurrence of eventsand existence of objects (what we refer to as reality), and the humanexperience, interpretation or understanding of such events andoccurrences. He also confuses Foucault's view that there is anunbridgeable gap between words and things with a claim that there areonly words. Implicit in Megill's realism is belief in a form of knowledgeavailable to us which corresponds directly to 'brute experience' (Simons,1999a, pp. 90-2). Such a form of knowledge is clearly distinguished fromthe imaginary realm of the aesthetic, thereby accentuating the modernistdifferentiation of the cognitive and aesthetic value spheres. A centralpoint about Nietzsche's and Foucault's claims about the relationbetween a will to knowledge and a will to power, or thepower/knowledge nexus, is that these conceptual distinctions betweenthe value spheres do not hold. Yet Megill's argument works only on theassumption that they do, treating the aesthetic turn of both as if itapplies only to the realm of the imagination.

Jrgen HabermasHabermas (1987) claims that the motor of Foucault's genealogies is atranscendental concept of power, 'a metaphysically isolated subject,thrown back reflectively upon itself, toward restless self-mastery' (p.269). He accepts that there is some aesthetic basis for politicalargumentation. He conceptually divides modern Western culture intocognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive valuespheres, each of which has its own validity claims and each of whichwhen connected with interests is institutionalised into different orders oflife and subjected to the rule of experts. Habermas' trisection of cultureand life orders is a systmatisation of Weber's account of rationalizationof religious world-views into autonomous spheres which pursue theirown logic in competition with each other (Habermas, 1984, pp. 234-41).Disenchantment is for Weber an inevitable consequence ofrationalization, a theme which is clearly connected to that of the sense of

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loss of certain aspects of modern subjectivity. Habermas in turn isacutely aware of the values of the cultural spheres that have lost out tothe objectivist scientific and political technologies.

In this context, aesthetic-expressive action is most sensitive to theinner subjective world that is ignored by objectivizing instrumental andstrategic action. Emotional, unconscious and bodily aspects of lifebelong to the aesthetic-expressive value sphere, recognition of which isinstitutionalized in autonomous modern art, which has become a refugefor needs that could not be satisfied by the system. In the Weberianscheme the full pursuit of aesthetic life-styles, of absolute expressiveauthenticity, is a form of protest against disenchantment. As protest,aesthetic thought can correct some excessive features of modernization.However, while aesthetic-expressive action serves as a legitimate protestagainst the excesses of instrumental reason, its own autonomy is itself aresult of the rationalization of the modern world. The aesthetic-expressive sphere on its own can provide no logic of social interaction,and hence counter-cultural forms of life such as Bohemianism areinherently unstable. There are thus dangers in overlooking the need forcommunicative action aimed at reaching agreement which would resultfrom the over-extending of aesthetic claims, as in fascisticaestheticization of politics (Habermas, 1983, pp. 10-12). Autonomousmodern art is as likely to degenerate into 'propagandists mass art orinto commercialized mass culture' as it is to 'transform itself into asubversive counterculture' (Habermas, 1988, p. 86).

According to Stephen White (1986), who submits Foucault to atrenchant Habermasian critique, Foucault's excluded other is anaesthetic subject, which embodies our expressive, creative and bodilyqualities. White agrees with Foucault that during the process ofmodernization these aspects of our lives have been devalued. Cognitivetruth claims to communicative validity have 'colonized' the interactive,normative and aesthetic, authenticity claims. Correspondingly, thescientific-technological sphere of life predominates over the moral-practical and aesthetic-expressive ones. Yet, we require appropriatestandards of judgement between competing claims for justice andTightness. Foucault's commitment to political fringe movements andparticular types of collective action forces him out of the 'detachedperspective' assumed in his archaeological-genealogical analysis ofmodernity. Foucault speaks, claims White, from a critical aestheticperspective which can unexpectedly discover 'things exceeding theconfines of any rational, methodical, self-disciplining interrogatoryframework'. Though it contradicts his position that such a move wouldbe no more than 'another act in the endlessly repeated play ofdomination', Foucault nonetheless 'offers an account of the aestheticsubject' in terms of 'bodies and pleasures' and 'subjugated knowledges',giving 'the haunting sense of a lost potential of human being'. 'The

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implicit presence of a distinctive subject', bound up with 'pre-rational,embodied otherness' is associated with the early Stoic aesthetics ofexistence and Baudelairean dandyism (pp. 427,419,423,424).

White concurs with Habermas that Foucault's critical standards arederived from the unspoken language of the body in pain, crushed byoppressive power, and whose wholeness belongs to an aesthetictradition (Habermas, 1987, p. 284). As Eagleton (1990) points out, themodern discourse of aesthetics begins as one of the body, referring tophysical perception and sensation (p. 13). In this broad sense, aestheticsis associated with all human qualities escaping reason, such as instinct,habit, creativity and the libido. White argues, on the one hand, thatHabermas is sensitive to the pre-rational other, recognising animbalance between the scientific-technological, moral-practical, andaesthetic-expressive spheres in modern society which must be corrected.On the other hand, Foucault seems to want to extend the aestheticspheres to cover the others, armed only with an ethics defined as arelationship to the self. In general, while Foucault's critics may acceptthat art expresses some legitimate protest against exclusion of humancreative and libidinal qualities, they cannot accept what Habermas callsthe terrorist over-extension of the aesthetic cultural order into domainssuch as politics. Indeed, Habermas (1983) identifies Foucault as a YoungConservative who turns to aesthetic modernity as a means to escape theconstraints of the modern world and its oppressive rationalization (p.14). Such a turn must ultimately be self-defeating as it exploits theautonomy of art culminating in the self-referentiality of 'art for art'ssake' which is a result of the rationalisation of the lifeworld. So,Habermas' critique is also based on an understanding that the valuespheres really are differentiated.

Foucault's Aesthetics in Relation to Modernist Art

Foucault's critics do have some good grounds for holding that heappeals to modernist conceptions of aesthetics. His writing onmodernist and particularly avant-garde art and literature do suggest inparts that Foucault regards them as escape routes from the constraints ofmodernity or as spaces of absolute transgression in their own right.Modernist art is often associated by Foucault with transgression oflimits. Foucault relates to avant-garde literature as both a site of freedomand as critical perspective, in both cases its power being derived from itsself-referentiality and reflexivity. It is therefore relevant to analyze hisattitude to avant-garde writing which, he says 'has freed itself from thenecessity of 'expression'; it only refers to itself (Foucault, 1977, p. 116).This is not only a question of a self-conscious relationship with otherpaintings and texts (Foucault, 1977, p. 92), but as David Carroll (1987)

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comments, it is also a question of a 'self-reflexive pursuit of the origin oflanguage [which] leads to the repeated discovery of the lack offoundation of language, the "essential void" at its center' (p.115). Just as'mad' art approaches the very edge of the abyss of madness, so doesmodernist literature draw as close as possible to the void which is theabsence of its origin or foundation. Foucault often associatestransgression with awareness of and proximity to a void or an absence.Modernist literature and art in general is considered by Foucault toconcern itself with the absence of a foundation of discourse or ofrepresentation. It is thus conceivable that Foucault perceives the absenceof foundation as a condition of absolute autonomy or unconstrainedfreedom, though as I will argue shortly he does not conceive oftransgression as the overcoming of all constraints.

In his book on Raymond Roussel, Foucault (1987) claims that theauthor discovers that 'language speaks only from something essentialthat is lacking' (p. 165). The first void, where a foundation should be, isthe failure of language to represent things. In his poetry Roussel showsthat his words are not a representation of things, though it is onlythrough words that things can be represented. Language can also rendervisible things that are invisible because, like Roussel's creatures andmachines, they are impossible. 'Things are perceptible only throughlanguage' (p. 121). Because language, as signification, is not a directdesignation of things, its meaning floats. The second absent foundationis the sovereign role of the author, of his intention and consciousness.Roussel employs language games 'which function independently,pulling the author into a logic of which he is the occasion more than thesubject' (p. 65). It is language rhyming with itself that produces fantasticcreatures and objects, not Roussel's imagination (pp. 26-7).

In the absence of foundations of discourse, Roussel engages inlanguage games. He exploits the poverty of signifiers, the gap betweenwords and world, to introduce double meanings (pp. 14-16). One of hisbooks, Impressions d'Afrique, is an extended metagram, the filling in ofthe space between two similar sounding sentences, like a game ofChinese whispers.2 Roussel's other language game is the construction of'machines' that produce improbable figures, impossible objects. Themost simple of these machines is the combination of two words whichdo not belong together, such as 'crachat delta (delta of spittle)'. Byfollowing obscure associations of words, distant objects can be linked bywords to establish 'a fantastic ontology ... a dynasty of the improbable'(pp. 36-7). The play of associations, the 'horizontal diffusion' of words,relies on tropological meanings, which is the diversion of words fromoriginal to new but associated meanings, as in metaphors (pp. 34,15).3

The underlying condition of possibility of Roussel's work and basisfor his creativity is the absence of foundations on which it comments.This absence is 'a void that has to be revealed and at the same time

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filled' (p. 19). There is thus a temptation for Foucault to conceive ofRoussel's void, of the non-space of transgression, as a site of freedom.Although 'the language in which transgression will find its space andthe illumination of its being lies almost entirely in the future', there is ahint that it exists at least partially in the present. 'We must try toassimilate ... these extreme forms of language in which Bataille,Blanchot, and Klossowski have made their home' so that they might'serve as the basis for finally liberating our language'. A new languagewill arise from the absence of the philosophical subject at whose innercore the 'mad philosopher' can find 'the transgression of hisphilosophical being' (Foucault, 1977, pp. 33, 38-9, 41, 44). Foucault atpoints privileges literature as if it were a site of absolute transgression, aspace in which thinking otherwise is automatic or natural. Literatureseems to be exterior to the modern episteme:

... throughout the nineteenth century and right up to our day - fromHlderlin to Mallarm and on to Antonin Artaud - literature achievedautonomous existence ... forming a sort of 'counter-discourse' ... This iswhy literature is appearing more and more as that which must bethought. (Foucault, 1973, pp. 43-4)

A similar void and lack of foundation for representation is exposed byMagritte's visual games, according to Foucault (1983). The commonspace in which words and images both signify objects, i.e., the calligram,is destroyed. It is not surprising that Magritte's work interestedFoucault, and vice versa, as he pursued the same theme of the distancebetween words and things, feeling an affinity with Roussel andpresenting an exhibition in New York entitled 'Words and Things'.Traditionally, a calligram captures the object it represents both byportraying its shape (using words as lines) and signifying its meaning(using words as signs). Magritte's paintings, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, andLes Deux mystres, unravel the calligram, 'disturbing all the traditionalbounds of language and the image' (p. 22).

The writing which proclaims beneath the image of what is evidentlya pipe that 'this is not a pipe' can be taken on several levels: (1) "This isnot a pipe but a drawing of a pipe', in which case we experiencesomething akin to the distance between words and things thatpreoccupies Roussel; (2) "This is not a pipe but a sentence saying thatthis is not a pipe' which is logically correct but disturbing in the contextwhere the sentence is expected to serve as a label; (3) 'The sentence 'thisis not a pipe' is not a pipe' which undermines the ability of any sentenceto serve as a label; (4) 'In the sentence 'this is not a pipe', this is not apipe', which focuses around the problem of designation, deliberatelyconfusing us as to what 'this' refers to: the painting, the writtensentence, or the drawing of the pipe; (5) As lines that function as part of

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an image, without bearing any meaning (pp. 22-30). Are words images?Are the lines of images to be read? Is it a page or a picture (pp. 32-3)?

In other games Magritte creates new relations between words andobjects by replacing objects with a vague shape on which is written thename of the object. We generally expect either to see an image of theobject or to read a text in which the objects are signified. Theaccumulative effect of Magritte's games is to 'allow discourse to collapseof its own weight' by becoming shape rather than signification (p. 38).Other games undermine the task of resemblance and similitude to affirmidentity, thereby pointing to the lack of foundation for representation. Insome paintings it is unclear what image is a resemblance of the other,while others make it unclear which part of the painting has beentransferred from elsewhere. This disturbs resemblance, whose functionis to establish a hierarchy of resemblance to an original, which wecannot locate because the paintings play with similitude. Pictures arecontinuous with, are similar to, that which they are supposed toresemble. Magritte also toys with resemblance by exaggerating it,making a pair of shoes resemble feet, pursuing a literalness whoseopposite can be found in Kandinsky's shapes that affirm themselveseven though they are not objects, in defiance of the traditional principlethat painting should affirm the representative bond of image and object(pp. 34-5).

Similitude allows for differences between objects yet nonethelessreveals identities (if not original ones), yet Magritte blends identities byblending the identities of objects, by making leaves blend into the shapeof birds (pp. 43-52). Ultimately, and as Warhol shows, similitude can beturned on itself to destroy identity, the point being not that everything isthe same, but that once categories have been evaded, multiplicity canexist without reference to fixed identities. This self-multiplication ofsimilitudes that 'refer to nothing more than themselves' parallelsRoussel's and others' self-reflexive language that repeats itself to infinity(Foucault, 1987, p. 54). In the cases of both Roussel and Magritte, then,Foucault is interested in the way they take language and representationto their limits in order to expose their absent foundations, while alsofashioning alternative modes of language and representationthemselves.

Avant-Garde Art and Transgression

Art, especially avant-garde modernist art, has a privileged place inFoucault's work. But is that a place of inappropriately privilegedfreedom that would then be extended to the rest of the world, as Megilland Habermas claim; or is it a difficult approach to critique, assuggested here? The discussion can be clarified by examining John

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Rajchman's (1985) interpretation, as he seems to concur with the criticsthat the early but not the later Foucault is an aestheticist. According toRajchman, Foucault's notion of transgression should be associated onlywith a counter-discourse to be found in literary modernism in which hesought a romantic alternative to an excessively rationalist andanthropocentric society. So, Rajchman lends support to the view ofFoucault's critics discussed above that Foucault relies on a modernistnotion of art and aesthetics. Rajchman interprets the task of modernistart to be the expression of what is excluded by ordinary discourse:death, objectless angst, nameless desire, fitful eroticism, as well asmadness. But Rajchman claims there is a major shift in Foucault's workwhen he abandons, around 1977, his own 'modernism' and faith in thetransgressive force of avant-garde literature. Such art is said totranscend the limits of experience, to articulate the unarticulated. Theconversion is said to come when Foucault realises that scientific, moraland aesthetic problems are not simply problems of language whoselimits can be overcome through transgression, by thinking theunthought, but that the fundamental arrangements of history are aboutpower, not language. We therefore cannot free ourselves by goingbeyond the limits of language, as modernist writers attempted to do.

While there is certainly something in Rajchman's interpretationwhich would rescue Foucault from critiques such as Megill's, hisperception of a radical break is not justified. Rajchman argues that theethic of transgression is replaced by 'the ethic of constant disengagementfrom constituted forms of experience, of freeing oneself for the inventionof new forms of life' (p. 37). He takes it that the notion of transgression isequivalent to that of transcendence or liberation. Yet, according toCarroll (1987), Foucault relies on disruptive literature and art to providealternative, transgressive perspectives of the present (pp. xvii-xviii). Indoing so, he relies on a genre of 'paraesthetic' critique, meaning 'anaesthetics turned against itself or pushed beyond or outside itself (p.xiv). A tension in his work arises because Foucault tends to identify tooclosely with transgressive texts by romanticising the 'mad' poets as iftheir disruption indicates not resistance to current limits on subjectivitybut the transcendence of all conditions of possibility. Foucault's workcan 'be considered to fluctuate between a negative but nonethelesstranscendent aestheticism - and a disruptive, critical paraesthetics' (p.129). There is tension between artistic transgression understood as a siteof freedom and as critical perspective. The presentation of Foucault'sabsolute transgressions of limits by means of aesthetic modernism istherefore a one-sided view of his work. This partial understanding ofFoucault's aesthetics also informs the critiques of Megill and Habermas.

The tension in Foucault's work identified by Carroll can be describedas one between visions of artistic freedom where conditions ofsubjectivity are entirely self-given, where self-referential art transcends

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its conditions of possibility in absolute transgression, and his realizationthat transgression is always relative to context, that freedom is always aquestion of more or less. When Foucault follows the tendency ofaesthetic transcendence, he arrives at the position wherein self-reflexivethought and self-referential arts of the self appear to be completelyautonomous, without any limits or conditions of possibility. Such a viewwould suggest that Foucault does subscribe to modernist aestheticism.When he pursues the line of paraesthetic critique, Foucault indicates thelimits that can and should be transgressed because they are contingentconstraints.

If we concentrate on Foucault's paraesthetic tendency, we find thathe contradicts the possibility of an absolute transgression of limits. Thisposition explains Foucault's (1965) statement that 'madness is theabsolute break with the work of art', that neither Nietzsche nor VanGogh could produce paintings or philosophy in a state of madness. Thework is 'the sheer cliff over the abyss of the work's absence'; it is thatwhich 'coincides with the void'. This transgressive art takes us right upto the void, the absence. 'It is the world that becomes culpable ... inrelation to the work of art' and that 'must justify itself before madness'(pp. 287-9). It is forced to recognise that there is something beyond itselfof which it does not have the measure, which it does not control. The'mad' philosophers and poets evoke the experience of madness in thatthey teeter on its edge, indicate the limits of discourse, and celebrate thepresence of absence, refusing to avoid the void. Yet critics such as Wolin(1986) insist that Foucault's references to the poets of madness indicatethat he is on the side of unreason, opposed to Enlightenment that'deserves to perish in a paroxysm of violence' whereas the 'aestheticrealm ... [becomes] the sovereign and exclusive source of value andmeaning in life' (78). To be sure, Madness and Civilization uses thevocabulary of repression or confinement to characterise the relationbetween reason or psychiatry and madness (Foucault, 1965, p. ix). Yetthe final chapter from which Wolin quotes makes it clear that madnessand the critical work of art through which it is mediated areincompatible.

Roussel, an example of modernist self-referential literature, alsowrites in response to the void which might be seen as a non-space oftransgression. If Foucault were completely seduced by the freedom ofart he would present Roussel's games as uninhibited creative play. Itwould be a response of 'pure invention' to the absence of foundations(Foucault, 1987, 16). Yet, in Foucault's view, Roussel's games are therules of his language that constitute its condition of possibility, and it ishis machinery that gives his work its unity. Despite the utterimprobability of what Roussel writes, even his monstrosities are theresult of strict laws of association (pp. 36-8). As these laws can bededuced from his language games, 'Roussel appears as ... the inventor of

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a language which only speaks about itself ... a language about language'(p. 166). His is a self-reflexive critique of the limits that make hisdiscourse possible.4 Roussel's void is not the site of absolutetransgression but a source of anguish and 'an absolute emptiness ofbeing that he must surround, dominate and overwhelm with pureinvention' (p. 16). Roussel casts 'verses into the void' hoping 'toconstruct a dam against this opening' where language falls apart,pouring 'fantastic and meticulous figures' into the '"tropological" space'(pp. 138,153). In part Roussel expresses the fear of the modernist whosefoundations have been undermined, but he also exemplifies the anxietyof the postmodernist venturing beyond critique of existing conditions ofpossibility in order to establish new ones.

Foucault's predominant view of transgressive literature is that itreaches the limits of what can be said, rather than going beyond it.However much Bataille may try to speak of the unconscious and taboo,he is thrown 'upon the sands of that which he can no longer say',exhausted by the attempt 'to speak of this experience' and to make 'itspeak from the depths where its language fails' (Foucault, 1977, 39-40).In his treatment of modernist literature Foucault on the whole avoidsthe danger of identifying freedom with disruptive force and regardingart as naturally autonomous. Literary transgression is not atranscendence of limits, but a recognition of finitude.5 Modernistliterature 'gives prominence ... to the fundamental forms of finitude'.Extending language to its limits leaves man 'not at the very heart ofhimself but at the brink of that which limits him' (Foucault, 1973, p. 383).The finitude of language and hence of man can be experienced in thoseexperiences that limit him - death and madness. These experiences aretransgressive in so far as they reveal and define finitude, and notbecause they are beyond it. Transgression is not a site beyond limits, buta non-space devoid of positive content.

The transgression of limits, as understood by Foucault in hisreadings of Bataille and Blanchot, defines the difficult, perhaps literallyinconceivable space, in which limits are transgressed without beingerased. This is the unstable space in which there must always be limitsthat are both enabling and constraining. 'Transgression is an actionwhich involves the limit'. We only know that there are limits becauseacts of transgression illustrate their location, revealing how far it ispossible to go. 'Transgression forces the limit ... to find itself in what itexcludes'. At the same time, transgression is relative to the limit itviolates: 'to what void does it owe the unrestrained fullness of its being,if not that which it crosses in its violent act and which ... it crosses out inthe line it effaces?' Thus transgression is not the opposite of the limit,but the illumination of limits, 'like a flash of lightning in the night which... owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation'. Transgression isnot 'a victory over limits', but a form of 'nonpositive affirmation', like

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Blanchot's 'contestation' according to which one proceeds 'until onereaches the empty core where being achieves its limit and where thelimit defines being'. Transgression does not overcome limits, restore therepressed, and instigate the rule of freedom, but shows that what weare, our being, depends on the existence of limits. To overcome limitswould be to end being, which is necessarily finite (Foucault, 1977, pp.33-8).

Transgression is more than the analysis of limits as it demonstratesthat no limits are absolute. The most absolute limit was embodied in theexistence of God, who revealed man's finitude while proclaiming hisown infinity and positively affirming a limitless being exterior to therealm of limits. God was a 'word that surpasses all words', designatingsomething more than could be expressed in any language. The death ofGod 'discloses ... the limitless reign of the Limit', by denying thepossibility of an existence beyond limits and nonpositively affirming thelimited nature of all being. Yet 'what does it mean to kill God if he doesnot exist, to kill god who has never existed'? It means to transgress,which is 'profanation in a world which no longer recognizes anypositive meaning in the sacred' (Foucault, 1977, pp. 30-2). The possibilityof transgression depends on recognition of the limitedness of the limitand the practice of an excess, which like Bataille's language of sexuality,breaks taboos whose holiness is hollow. Yet, it is not easy to experiencetransgression because in the contemporary world the spheres oftransgression, in particular sexuality or eroticism, have been absorbedby anthropological (or humanist) discourses. They confine transgressionto unilluminating reversals of prohibitions (Foucault, 1977, pp. 30, 50).So Foucault turns to particular, self-reflective forms of art, literature andphilosophy that make transgressive moves by revealing the limits oflanguage and thought without attempting to exist beyond them.

Transgression, then, is not only difficult to conceive but is inherentlyunstable. There are only acts and moments of transgression, rather thanfirm grounds and secure sites. Transgression is a risky act of teetering onthe edge of an abyss into which one might fall. Foucault does onoccasion fall into this void, when he suggests the possibility of thinking,living or creating without limits. He is tempted to leap into the abyss ofabsolute transgression as if freedom were a safe place beyond all limits.At those points, he can be considered an aestheticist who relates to thewhole world as a work of art to be created as one wills since there are nolimits. But in his overall perspective, 'the instantaneous play of the limitand of transgression' is 'a Critique and an Ontology, an understandingthat comprehends both finitude and being '(Foucault, 1977, pp. 33,38).

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Foucault's Critical Ethos

What is striking about Foucault's formulations about transgressiveavant-garde literature is that some twenty years later they continue toprovide him with a model for his critical thinking about discursiveregimes, power relations, subjectification and aesthetics of existence. Inhis essay on Kant and Enlightenment, Foucault endorses in them 'notfaithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivationof an attitude - that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be describedas a permanent critique of our historical era' (Foucault, 1984, p. 42).Foucault defines this philosophical ethos as a 'limit attitude'. In thisrespect, Kant had been concerned to clarify universal formal structuresthat place necessary limits on the use of human reason, and to know'what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing'. Foucaulthistoricizes what Kant regards as universal, just as Magritte and Rousselhighlighted the contingency of the rules of representation. And just asthey worked reflexively to show the limits of the rules that made theirwork possible and in doing so transgressed those rules by formulatingtheir own, so does Foucault advocate 'a practical critique that takes theform of a possible transgression' (p. 45). Whereas the avant-garde artistsapplied transgressive critique primarily to their work, Foucault appliesit more broadly to 'ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinkingand saying' ( p. 46):

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered ... as an attitude,an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is atone and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that areimposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyondthem (p. 50).

Bracketing Foucault's work over two decades is the theme of a criticalontology of ourselves, a critique of the limits on our being that is also anexperiment in transgressing those limits, while accepting that any beingentails limits. We must refuse to be seduced by the notion of atransgression beyond all limits, and of an art that is free because of itsself-referential and autotelic nature. In political terms, this means thatthere can be no transgressive politics as such, but transgressive politicalmoments when all systems and orders appear to be contingentimpositions.

Foucault (1984) links his notion of critical ontology, his critical ethosof modernity, to Baudelaire's ascetic dandy, 'who makes of his body, hisbehavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art'(pp.41-2). Aesthetics of existence or arts of the self are thus intrinsic tothe critical ethos that Foucault develops in relation to transgressiveartistic practice. Baudelaire valorizes the present through:

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... a desperate eagerness ... to imagine it otherwise than it is, and totransform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is ...extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of aliberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it. (p.41)

Close attention to reality is critique: its violation is transgression that isnever 'beyond' the present but works with the corrupt materials itpresents. Foucault's arts of existence are also cognitive as well asaesthetic, in that efforts at self-fashioning in the face of subjecting powerrelations provide a great deal of critical experiential knowledge.6

Foucault's modernist critics would agree with him that an appeal tocertain types of art and aesthetics offers critical perspectives onmodernity, but only because they regard aesthetics as a distinct valuesphere, following Kant's designation that is reworked via Weber byHabermas into the cognitive-instrument, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive value spheres. For example, Wolin (1986) argues that theUtopian worlds imagined through the aesthetic impulse 'are able topresent a powerful indictment of the existing world', but that criticalaesthetic function should have effect by means of 'the interpntrationof the aesthetic sphere with other realms - ethical and cognitive' (p. 85).According to this tradition, it is only in so far as art is autonomous,uncontaminated by instrumental reason, that it has critical force. At thecore of Megill's and especially Habermas' misapprehensions aboutFoucault's aestheticism is a difference over the critical use-value ofavant-garde art. For Foucault, such art does not provide, even obliquelyor negatively, standards of critique against which to measure modernity.Rather, it puts into practice the ethos of critique that characterizesmodernity. While this difference gives Foucault's critics the advantageof being able to specify why what they found wrong with modernity iswrong, it gives Foucault the advantage of connecting his philosophicalethos to cultural practice.

Acknowledgements. A previous version of this paper was presented at theManchester Centre for Political Thought conference on Nietzsche and Foucault,13 March 1998. I am grateful to participants at that conference for theircomments, and also to an anonymous reviewer at Cultural Values.

Notes

1. According to Megill, it was his contemporaries rather than Kant himself whoperceived an autonomous realm of the aesthetic. In his interpretation, Kant'sjudgement of beauty is not an expression of Truth but of somethingunavailable to our categories of knowledge, yet it should nonetheless benecessary and universal, symbolising the morally good and grounded in thepurposiveness of nature. As I take it, the dominant interpretation holds that

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ultimately aesthetic judgement is subjective and ungrounded, as Kant'scontemporaries believed.

2. The two phrases are 'les lettres du blancs sur les bandes du vieux billard'(the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table) and 'les lettres dublancs sur les bandes du vieux pillard' (the white man's letters on the hordesof the old plunderer) (Foucault, 1987, p. 13). In this case, only one word needbe changed to radically alter the meaning of the sentence, but there are alsoexamples in which the similar sound of words is what connects completelydifferent phrases (see pp. 41-3). A classic comic pair of English phrases,which I know from my father, that portrays the same duality of language is:'send reinforcements: we're going to advance' and 'send three [shillings] andfourpence: we're going to a dance.'

3. Roussel's parody of 'the classical treatise on grammar and logic' (Foucault,1987, p. 148) might be compared with the classic Monty Python parrotsketch, in which a disgruntled customer complains of the death of his newpet by repeating the entries in a thesaurus for 'dead'. The shop owner'sdisavowals that the bird is not dead but sleeping do not totally contradict thecomplaint as 'asleep' is listed as a possible synonym for dead. Themetaphorical use of words, which is the basis of the uncanny humour here,makes two words bear the same meaning while their users are trying toinsist on their difference.

4. Similarly, Foucault (1977) is interested in 'the fatal space in which languagespeaks of itself to tell the story of its 'mirrored structure', repeating itself toinfinity in rare 'phenomena of self-representation' (pp. 54-8).

5. Foucault (1988) severely criticised the notion that literature itself was eitherautonomous or in itself subversive (p. 309).

6. For a fuller account of the relation between Foucault's earlier work onmodernist art and his later aesthetics of existence, see Simons (1995, pp. 68-80). For a fuller account of the departure of Foucault's aesthetics of existencefrom some Left notions of the aestheticization of politics, see Simons (1999b).

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Simons, Jon 1999b: The Aestheticization of Politics: An Alternative to Left-Modernist Critiques. Strategies, 12(2) (forthcoming).

White, Stephen 1986: Foucault's Challenge to Critical Theory. American PoliticalScience Review 80(2), pp. 419-32.

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Jon Simons is Lecturer in Critical Theory, University of Nottingham. Heis the author of Foucault and the Political and several essays in political,cultural and feminist theory. He is currently working on a project about'thinking in images' that examines the relevance of both aesthetics andepistemology to contemporary politics that is dominated by images.

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