Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (New Accents Series)

264 Pages·1992·2.73 MB·English

by  Simon During

FOUCAULT AND LITERATURE
FOUCAULT AND
LITERATURE
Towards a Genealogy of Writing
Simon During
London and New York
First published 1992
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc.
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 1992 Simon During
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
During, Simon
Foucault and literature: towards a genealogy of writing.
1. Literature. Criticism.
Foucault, Michel
I. Title
801.95
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
During, Simon
Foucault and literature : towards a genealogy of writing/Simon
During.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
1. English literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc.
2. American literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc.
3. Foucault, Michel—Contributions in criticism. 4. Foucault,
Michel—Views on literature. 5. Foucault, Michel—Influence.
I. Title.
PR21.D87 1992
820.9—dc20 91—17468
ISBN 0-203-35891-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-37147-X (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-01241-4 (Print Edition)
0-415-01242-2 (pbk)
For Nicholas and Lisa
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Before reading Foucault 1
1 MADNESS 23
2 MEDICINE, DEATH, REALISM 43
3 LITERATURE AND LITERARY THEORY 67
4 KNOWLEDGE 91
5 GENEALOGY, AUTHORSHIP, POWER 1 17
6 DISCIPLINE 1 43
7 LIFE, SEXUALITY AND ETHICS 1 61
8 POST-FOUCAULDIAN CRITICISM: GOVERNMENT, 1 81
DEATH, MIMESIS
9 AFTER READING FOUGAULT: BACK TO THE AUTHOR 2 03
Conclusion 2 29
Notes 2 33
Bibliography 2 39
Index 2 51
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
During this book’s rather prolonged period of gestation, I have drawn heavily
on other people’s kindness and tolerance. Professionally, I should like to thank,
in particular, Ken Ruthven, Terence Hawkes, Catherine Gallagher, Lisa
O’Connell and Anne Maxwell, all of whom responded to earlier drafts—and
helped, in various ways, the process of completion.
My original editor, Jane Armstrong, was exceptionally encouraging. The
goodwill of my colleagues at the University of Melbourne has sustained me.
But it was Lisa and Lisabeth who have really paid the price for this book. May
this book provide, somehow, some recompense.
INTRODUCTION
Before reading Foucault
Michel Foucault was a different kind of intellectual from his predecessors, one
whose work articulated a new relation both to the institutions in which he
worked and to a wider public. By the end of his life, he held a prestigious chair
at the Collège de France and his work was leaving its traces, more or less directly,
on an extraordinarily wide range of academic research. As Didier Eribon’s
recent biography makes apparent, it was not a position that he would have
achieved, despite the power of his work, had he not become an active member
of the French academic system and its patronage networks; had he not, for
instance, been involved in the Gaullist reform of higher education in the early
sixties (Eribon 1989, 158–61). But, as Eribon also makes clear, his personal
history included a suicide attempt, a nervous breakdown, a short period of
institutionaiization, a police file, accusations of theft as a student and so on. To
the end (he was, tragically, to die of complications following his infection with
HIV), his gayness remained a source of potential scandal within conservative
educational institutions. It might be thought that there is nothing unusual in
this: such divisions between the public and the private are common enough,
after all. What is remarkable in Foucault’s career, though, is the way in which
he brought the two sides of his life together. His academic skills, resources and
prestige worked in the interest of his personal life and all those who share such
lives—the institutionalized, prisoners, the “mad,” those whose enjoy sexual acts
outside of the so-called “normal,” and other victims of socially sanctioned
violence.
Foucault’s reconciliation of the academic and the marginal or transgressive
did not come easily. He kept his own private life private, never publicly reflecting
upon the shift of institutional relations that his career represented. Yet, since his
death, the conditions that made his work possible are becoming less obscure. It
is important, I think, to take note of them in approaching his achievements.
Most obviously, during his lifetime, opportunities for serious analysis and
publication outside the academy diminished. This meant that, even in France,
old “free-floating” intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Blanchot were
being succeeded by professional teachers and researchers like Foucault. Second,
the expansion of student numbers after the Second World War, a world-wide
2 FOUCAULT AND LITERATURE
phenomenon, offered academic work a larger constituency than ever before.
Writing aimed at readers with a tertiary education and an interest in academic
or quasi-academic trends, could become widely recognized, fashionable even—
all the more so if it breached traditional disciplinary divisions. Last, and most
importantly, during the fifties and sixties established political parties, including
the PCF (the French Communist Party), became less and less connected to the
actual needs, desires, and interests of individuals. Individual and group identities
could be organized around categories, such as age, gender and sexual preference,
that a political system based on representative democracy did not in fact
represent. It became possible for intellectuals-as-academics to articulate these
interests through their scholarly work. And when that opportunity was seized,
the present’s relation to the past began to change. In particular, an extraordinary
new account of modern society sprang to view—one which Foucault expressed
most lucidly and freshly. This account also changed perceptions of literature’s
function and status.
My book offers an interpretation of Foucault’s analysis of modern society and
culture for students of literature. That is the purpose of its first seven chapters,
which introduce his work in roughly chronological order. I have wanted to help
disseminate the exciting shifts that his work embodies as widely as possible,
presupposing no prior acquaintance with his work. Not that I have felt
constrained to repeat his own themes and research: in the second half of my
third chapter, for instance, I ofFer an account of the development of British state
power and welfarism in relation both to a particular kind of writing and to
literary criticism. And, in my last two chapters, I have tried to move past his
work by showing how it has allowed us to re-formulate the terms and methods
of literary history. For, in developing his contribution, one also, I think, keeps
it alive.
There is a problem with a book which claims, at least in part, to offer an
interpretation of Foucault. For he himself often complained about interpretation
or what he called “commentary.” When he criticized commentary he was
dissociating himself from a procedure close to the heart of the modern
humanities, falling as they do between the interpretative methodologies that we
can call, on the one hand, historicism and, on the other, hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics regards interpretation as necessary because it assumes that texts
or events lose their original meaning both as time goes by and in the process of
communication. Historicism engages in interpretation because it supposes that
texts or events conceal, and are ordered by, an absent structure (a “context” or
a political “unconscious”) that a good reader can bring to light—if not necessarily
as a “meaning” then as a condition of possibility. Foucault’s argument against
interpretation goes like this: to set up textual analysis as a play between origins
and texts leads to infinite regression. It is not just that each interpretation, being
a text itself, requires further commentary; no text can ever have a moment when
it is present to itself. As he bluntly put it: “If interpretation can never be achieved
it is simply because there is nothing to interpret” (Foucault 1971b, 187). It is
INTRODUCTION 3
always too late to uncover an “original meaning,” a stable “context,” so that, as
Foucault also wrote, “everything is already interpretation” (ibid.). And the
search for textual origins and true meanings has institutional consequences: it
allows “good readers” to be grouped together in professions or schools that
develop approved procedures and exclude others. Under the domination of
interpretative paradigms, literary and cultural pedagogy and research have
tended to reconstitute the truth of past moments and writings so as to establish
a cultural heritage, rather than, for instance, circulating information, uncovering
forgotten voices, debating and working through difficult methodological or
theoretical problems.
Through the vicissitudes of his career, Foucault tried not to interpret. Yet few
contemporaries have themselves attracted so much commentary. Books and
articles about him continue to flow from the presses, sometimes repeating his
thought in a tabulated, clear form, sometimes explaining his own influences and
place in the contemporary context, sometimes—to take just two instances—
arguing that he is really connected to the new right or that, at the very heart of
his work, we find an avant-garde literary theorist. His own remarks help explain
why: commentary makes its objects attractive in a process which obscures them
as it explains them. It generates itself. Of course the widespread fascination with
Foucault cannot be explained merely as a product of interpretation’s internal
and formal law of accumulation. His work is important and fascinating just
because, in resisting the disciplinary boundaries and interpretative procedures,
it acquired an extraordinary variety. To read it well one must know about, say,
biology before Linnaeus (history of science), the theory of social control
(sociology), Heidegger’s “destruction of metaphysics” (phenomenology), Greek
sexual practices (the classics), the experiments of the French new new novel
(literary theory/history), the history of punishment in the eighteenth century
(social history) and so on. The reason for this richness of subject-matter is not
simply that Foucault, working to offer the unrepresented a voice, is no respecter
of disciplinary specialization. Rather, he no longer operates in an intellectual
context for which it goes without saying that this approach is proper to that topic,
or that this topic connects with that one—just because that is the way it has
traditionally been in academic research. The unproblematic parcelling out of
modes of thought to specific topics being no longer possible, Foucault turns to
history. Not, however, traditional academic history but one which will help us
act in the present, either politically or, as he puts it in his last works, ethically.
For him, to write history requires constant, theoretical attention to
methodologies, purposes and effects in the lived-in world. So the diversity of
Foucault’s work can also be read as a moment in the contemporary crisis of
knowledge’s reflection on itself. One might say that for Foucault there never are
any absolutely good reasons for deciding what counts as knowledge and what
does not. That is why he is drawn to treat of the history of theory—as he does
in what perhaps remain his most powerful works, The Order of Things, and The
Archaeology of Knowledge.