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Part 1
The biobody
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1 Foucault’s optics*
The (in)vision of mortality and modernity
At the high point of modernity, God and man are called upon to die in favour of each other. Or, as Michel Foucault tells it, our vision of ourselves now derives from an ‘autopsical’ finitude grounded in the clinical optic that has opened the dark interior of the human body to the light of mankind’s own practices of pleasure and suffering. With the effacement of the divine landscape of infinite time-space, mankind has begun to inhabit the earth and the body for the first time and to essay a history of good and evil that is likewise to be inscribed for the first time on a human scale. Thus, ‘mankind’ set aside any comparative transcendental measure in favour of its own embrace, the fold (le pli) within which we must see and think and speak for ourselves (Deleuze, 1986; Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 103).
Whereas so much commentary has focused upon Foucault’s genealogical and archaeological studies, I propose to explore Foucault’s poetics of the visual regime of modernity and morality that have constituted modern man in a moment of history that may be about to efface itself. Since I consider this next moment of modernity not to be very well understood in current celebrations of post-modernity (O’Neill, 1989, 1990), I shall try to set it out with particular attention to the pathos and poetry given to it in Foucault’s work.
What I think is most noticeable in Foucault’s text is an effect of writing, an extraordinary poetry, grafted upon the genealogies of life and death, of reason and madness, of order and transgression. Within the new institutions of human finitude and their rational discourses, there persists a capacity for lyrical, oneiric flights and for fantastic epiphanies which reveal the bright darkness as well as the sombre enlightenment of human existence. In Foucault’s thought rationality is re-visioned; its pursuits are limited and materialised. The life of ‘finite man’ opens up from the standpoint of death. This is the starting point both of modern science and of modern literature. And this brings about a fusion of philosophy and literature because the philosopher without total knowledge must become a writer. Here the prototype is Montaigne, the essayist of anti-foundational knowledge, himself an exemplar of the new finitude which is opened up like the New World by death and not by immortality. The sovereignty of death hollows out a void in the present from which we speak and write. Before death, which both proceeds and follows it, language turns back upon itself and prolongs the story which tells of everything that can befall us until we can no longer speak or write. In Foucault words are kept on the surface; they avoid sinking to any depth, or rising towards any transcendental perspective; they flit between the shadows left by the death of the subject. With the loss of this solidary presence every other thing necessarily slides. From where, then, can anything be said or seen? The question itself is refused. There are discourses. They hold for a time; they break and are reorganised. Their authority derives from their style which privileges catachresis (the misuse of words). The very flow of Foucault’s text confounds reviewers who see in it the faults but not the virtues of Bataillean expenditure (de-pens). Logorrhea appears to be the consequence of transgressing logocentrism. Nevertheless, Foucault’s discourse is marked by its own style, i.e., a mode of uncovering the absence at the heart of being and language, together with artifices whereby we conceal this void with anthropomorphic fictions. Style coexists with repression and grammar, i.e., desire and power masked in the will to truth. The latter functions to rule out the arbitrariness in every rule with respect to the free play in both the signifiers and, we should say, the signifieds.
The emergence of the modern individual is inseparable from ‘hir’ (that is, his and/or her) effacement. Like a Segal sculpture, the individual is woven from a fabric of anonymous and invisible forces which project ‘hir’ along their surface. In such images of modernity, materiality overrides transcendence with the awkward insistence of a kind of singularity that we have still to accept. The individual will never appear in full light. ‘She’ has lost for ever the aura of even a borrowed divinity. Neither angel nor beast, hir footprints mark the sands of time that just as easily erase hir trace on the shore of the earth. In the empty place abandoned by the gods, humans must erect their own shaky institutions, as the mark and laughter that momentarily recollect the diaspora of their kind:
Strangely enough, man – the study of whom is supposed by the naive to be the oldest investigation since Socrates – is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things, or, in any case, a configuration whose outlines are determined by the new position he has so recently taken up in the field of knowledge. Whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the facile solutions of an ‘anthropology’ understood as a universal reflection on man, half-empirical, half-philosophical. It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.
(Foucault, 1973: xxv; my emphasis)
The death of ‘man’ completes the death of God. (In view of contemporary concerns about non-sexist terminology, it should be understood that all references to ‘man’ are intended in the archaeological sense defined here, as well as being subject to Foucault’s philosophical laugh. See Foucault, 1973: 385) With the last gasp of transcendentalising humanism, there opens up human finitude within which we interrogate the ‘unthought’ (Ungedacht) of our thought, the silence of our language, the social determinisms in our freedom and the morbidity which spreads through our life:
For can I, in fact, say that I am this language that I speak, into which my thought insinuates itself to the point of finding in it the system of all its own possibilities, yet which exists only in the weight of sedimentations my thought will never be capable of actualizing altogether? Can I say that I am this labor I perform with my hands, yet which eludes me not only when I have finished it, but even before I have begun it? Can I say I am this life I sense deep within me, but which envelops me both in the irresistible time that grows side by side with it and poses me for a moment on its crest, and in the imminent time that prescribes my death? I can say, equally well, that I am and that I am not all this; the cogito does not lead to an affirmation of being, but it does lead to a whole series of questions concerned with being: What must I be, I who think and who am my thought, in order to be what I do not think, in order for my thought to be what I am not? What is this being, then, that shimmers and, as it were, glitters in the opening of the cogito, yet is not sovereignly given in it or by it?
(Foucault, 1973: 324-5)
Thus modern man will have an empirical affinity for the languages of the body. He will be driven to excavate the body’s dreams, its pathologies and its death, to enter the body’s spaces, to explore the abyss beneath its illness and to open up discourses ‘involving fidelity and unconditional subservience to the coloured content of experience – to say what one sees; but also a use involving the foundation and constitution of experience – showing by saying what one sees’ (Foucault, 1975: 196). The emergence of modern medical discourse and its anatomo-clinical method required that death and disease be removed from the metaphysics of evil and decay to be treated as material processes in the living bodies of mortal individuals. It was only by treating himself as morbid and as insane that modern man could create the two human sciences – medicine and psychology – that have individualised him by inscribing health and illness in a collective series and an homogeneous space. The reversal of human finitude with respect to the classical concept of universality occurred through the internalisation of the series of life and death. Clinical medicine is that positive science at the heart of the anthropological sciences which assigns a supreme value to individual life through its struggle with death. The latter struggle, however, is no longer based upon a romantic myth, to be found, for example, in Hegel’s master and slave dialectic. Rather, our struggle to the death opens up an incarnate history armed with its own science inscribed upon our very flesh and tissue and in a language for which the positive phenomenology of the body is also predestined:
And, generally speaking, the experience of individuality in modern culture is bound up with that of death: from Hölderlin’s Empedocles to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and on to Freudian man, an obstinate relation to death prescribes to the universal its singular fall, and lends to each individual the power of being heard forever; the individual owes to death a meaning that does not cease with him. The division that it traces and the finitude whose mark it imposes link, paradoxically, the universality of language and the precarious, irreplaceable form of the individual. The sense-perceptible, which cannot be exhausted by description, and which so many centuries have wished to dissipate, finds at last in death the law of its discourse, it is death that fixes the stone that we can touch, the return of time, the fine, innocent earth beneath the grass of words.
(Foucault, 1975: 197)
The Preface to The Birth of the Clinic opens with the announcement that Foucault’s book is about space, language, death and the medical gaze. We are immediately plunged into the body, into its intestines, into its brain, that is to say, into the dark interior of life brought to light through an optical shift whose articulation is absolutely tied to Foucault’s combination of poetics and discourse analysis. Thus in the mid-eighteenth century Pomme’s treatments of hysteria operated in terms of a conception of the membraneous tissue in the nervous system as a ‘dry parchment’ that could be steamed away, an operation that could be repeated on the intestines, the oesophagus and the trachea by means of hot baths taken for ten or twelve hours a day over ten months. A century later, Bayle’s observations of an anatomical lesion of the brain remark upon ‘false membranes’, often transparent and of variegated colours over their surface which itself varies in depth from the thinness of a spider’s web to the albuminous skin of an egg. The discourses of Pomme and Bayle are separated by a shift in the ratio of the visible and invisible interior of the body where light is thrown only in death, i.e., only through the autopsy which opened up a space where bodies and eyes could meet. The semantic shift between the two descriptions of the membraneous tissues did not involve a shift from a subjective to an objective medical discourse. Indeed, the discursive shift is barely perceptible unless we can ask a retrospective question concerning the articulation of words and things in order to discern the points at which their identity is broken, where their separation was amplified and then abandoned for a new plenitude of things and words:
In order to determine the moment at which the mutation in discourse took place, we must look beyond its thematic content or its logical modalities to the region where ‘things’ and ‘words’ have not yet been separated, and where – at the most fundamental level of language – seeing and saying are still one….We must place ourselves, and remain once and for all, at the level of the fundamental spatialization and verbalization of the pathological, where the loquacious gaze with which the doctor observes the poisonous heart of things is borne and communes with itself.
(Foucault, 1975: xi–xii)
The rise of medical empiricism is not a matter of the construction of quantitative studies such as Meckel’s proposal to correlate brain disorders with changes in the weight and volume of affected parts. Rather, it is due to the artisanal skill of the brain-breaker that the medical gaze owes its perception of the membraneous tissues, colours and texture of the brain. But the truths that come to light in this way differ entirely from those revealed under the heliotropism of earlier science. The latter grounded all perception in the prior light of ideality through which all appearances were rendered adequate to their essence. The new empiricism sees in the darkness of things; it introduces visibility into the invisible interiors of the body for whose description it must again apprentice words to things:
At the end of the eighteenth century…seeing consists in leaving to experience its greatest corporeal opacity; the solidity, the obscurity, the density of things closed in upon themselves, have powers of truth that they owe not to light, but to the slowness of the gaze that passes over them, around them, and gradually into them, bringing them nothing more than its own light. The r...
