The joy of torture + GreenFestival
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXIX. Foucault - part 9
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 3 - The Heart Laid Bare - Cont...
Foucault, like Bataille, had more than a theoretical interest in transgression. In these years, he evidently began to explore for himself a “shattering of the philosophical subject,” not just through intoxication and dreaming -- but also through an erotic kind of “suffering” that “breaks apart.” In his 1962 essay on transgression, he quoted one of Bataille’s most lyrical descriptions of the experience, which evokes a moment of “divine agony” when “I instantly reenter the night of a lost child, and enter the anguish, in order to prolong a rapture with no end other than exhaustion and no exit other than fainting. It is the joy of torture.”
This most excruciating (and mysterious) of pleasures was not an end in itself for either Bataille or Foucault. For Bataille, it was one basis for a kind of philosophical critique, laying bare the “nonsense of the will to know” -- and the purely negative freedom of the human being. By illuminating the enigma of transcendence, sado-masochistic eroticism offered an esoteric but potentially fruitful means of self-analysis, a way to pursue a “psychological quest.” And at the ultimate limit, where torture turned into ecstasy, a voluptuously painful eroticism made possible as well a “negative theology founded on mystical experience,” permitting a person (in Batailles words) “to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity.
p88
Foucault agreed. “Nothing is negative in transgression,” he declared in his 1962 essay on Bataille, explaining (and implicitly defending) a form of extreme erotic experience that is simultaneously “pure” and “confused...” “Transgression,” Foucault writes, thus “affirms the limited being” -- namely, the human being -- “and it affirms this limitlessness into which it leaps,” opening a space of possible transfiguration and offering us moderns our “sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated content.” Because this was the occult prospect conjured up by Bataille’s books, Foucault was only exaggerating slightly when he described them as a kind of “consecration undone: a transubstantiation ritualized in reverse” -- an unholy communication with uncanny daimonic forces, “where real presence becomes again a recumbent body.”
That Bataille's claim to originality rests, in part, on his approach to eroticism seems clear enough. Nietzsche, for all of his talk about bodies and power, was a man mortified by his own sexuality; it is in this area that Bataille most dramatically extends his master's thought. That the uninhibited pursuit of eroticism might enable a person to “say yes” to life, even “up to the point of death.” also seems plausible. Through the imaginative dramas that give to erotic rituals a pattern and unity, human beings can act out freely, and so gain a sense of mastery over, impulses and memories otherwise experienced as involuntary and perhaps intolerable...
p89
...as one of Bataille's besotted erotic heroes describes the experience in Story of the Eye, the greatest of his novels; “It struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection” and that “the goal of my sexual licentiousness” was “a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating."
I would love to quip that they just don't write porn like that anymore, but, alas, I really have no idea.
These preoccupations can be found, beautifully sublimated, in Jean Barraqué's most important composition from this period, Séquence, a concerto for soprano, percussion and "diverse instruments," which he completed in 1955. Barraqué had begun work on Séquence before meeting Foucault, planning at first to use poems by Rimbaud and the surrealist Paul Eluard as texts. Foucault, however, persuaded his lover to drop these texts and to use, instead, four poems by Nietzsche. The work is carefully shaped to climax with the most important of the poems, "Ariadne's Lament."
...At the heart of "Ariadne's Lament" is one of the key intuitions that Nietzsche in fact shares with Sade: that pleasure and pain are permeable, and that experiencing the transmutation of pain into pleasure, of hate into love, in Dionysian ecstasy, is the beginning of wisdom. As Gilles Deleuze would later gloss the philosophical subtext of the poem, "what we in fact know of the will to power is suffering and torture, but the will to power is still the unknown joy, the unknown happiness, the unknown God."
Ariadne (/æriˈædniː/; Latin: Ariadne; "most holy", Cretan Greek αρι [ari] "most" and αδνος [adnos] "holy"), in Greek mythology, was the daughter of Minos, King ofCrete, and his queen Pasiphaë, daughter of Helios. She is mostly associated with mazes and labyrinths, due to her involvement in the myths of the Minotaur and Theseus. Her father put her in charge of the labyrinth where sacrifices were made as part of reparations (either to Poseidon or to Athena, depending on the version of the myth); however, she would later help Theseus in overcoming the Minotaur and saving the would-be sacrificial victims. In other stories, she became the bride of the god Dionysus, with the question of her background as being either a mortal or a goddess varying in those accounts...
-Wiki
I was originally going to skip this bit about Ariadne, but labyrinths are going to be a thing later and this is kind of important to that.
p93
Nietzsche once put it this way: “The path to one's own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one's own hell."Green Festival.
I've been attending the GreenFestival here since it began in 2001. The first year or two I even paid the entrance fee. Back then the show didn't fill all of the space in the Concourse Exhibition Center, so there were blocked off sections. One year there was even room for a large geodesic dome to be erected in an otherwise empty area.
Soon, I started volunteering, both to get in free and to help the cause. The event really does run on volunteer power. But wielding that power requires good volunteer coordinators. The event has sometimes had this, and sometimes, not so much. In the early days I would volunteer for the setup crew. We would go in early and help everyone setup their booths and do all the hauling and misc. work required when putting on, what had by this point grown to be an event that completely packed the hall. One year a comfortable seating area was created by bringing in donated furniture and plants. And by furniture I mean large pieces like upholstered chairs and even sofas. We had to drive all over the city collecting these pieces, picking them up in people's living rooms and carrying them down stairs to the truck.
During these years I also worked on the breakdown crew. This was even more exhausting. As soon as the event ended on Sunday (5pm I think) all the vendors would start tearing down their booths and we would help them. Then we would clean up everything left behind. We would be riding around this huge empty hall in carts late into the night cleaning up the last of the trash.
There was always a demand for people to work on the GreenTeam... their efforts trying to make "The GreenTeam" sound like something elite and special only warned you that it was probably going to be nasty. Finally, one year (probably when I had burned out on working setup and breakdown) I gave it a shot. The GreenFestival really does go out of its way to divert as much waste and to recover as many resources as possible.
By this time the event was straining the space-limitations of the Concourse facility, so huge tents were typically erected outside the hall or else neighboring buildings were rented for special purposes like lectures. We scattered three-can recycling stations all over the place and provided monitors so that everyone knew what went where. Even with all that, there was still some physical sorting at the back-end, especially at the end of the show. At first I would work at least one shift on each of the three days of the event and then also join the sorting team at the end. I Introduced the idea of using these huge rubber bands to hold up the can-liner bags (people have a hard time buying liners that actually fit the cans -- I don't know why). I also sold the idea of placing large buckets at each station to collect liquids from drinks people are throwing out (otherwise the liquid weighs down the bags which leads to leaks or breaks -- not good in an indoor festival. The first year I was so keen to make sure it went smoothly I maintained the buckets myself. That means I went around dumping nearly full buckets into an even larger container which I carried around from station to station -- the mix of liquids can get pretty vile looking and also very heavy. The next step was to use wheeled dollies to hold the big containers. The final solution was to use more volunteers to bring empty buckets to stations and take away the full ones.
In recent years, I've only worked one shift per event, and then taken a quick walk through the show to see what's new. Yesterday I didn't take home a single flyer or business card or anything. There's still a good deal of interesting stuff to see, though not as much as previously, but nothing I hadn't seen before. Mostly GreenFestival is a marketplace for food, clothes, cosmetics, and whatnot that appeal to people interested in Green issues. I did have a very good (all raw, veggie salad assortment) lunch.
I signed up late to volunteer this year and could only get the 9am early shift. Once I got everything in order in my area (the food court, of course), there was nothing much to do as no one was ready for lunch yet. So I started thinking about this past Greening season and the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. What I recall most vividly now (over a month later) are the smoothies (slushies) I had on each of those, too hot, days. I would start with a largish cup of ice and juice and, as I consumed it, would add water from the bottle I keep in my cargo pants pocket. By the end of my break I would have downed both all the water and all the juice and would be well on the way to being hydrated again. But just sitting in the shade sucking up that sweet coldness was pure bliss.
This year is also GreenFestival's first at Fort Mason rather than at the Concourse (which is due to be torn down for re-development). My ties to Fort Mason go back even further than my ties to GreenFestival. I first visited the enclosed piers (once used by the Army to send cargo and troops -- including my dad -- to Pacific destinations, and now used as exhibition space) in 1976 when I was an exhibitor representing a very small East Coast literary magazine (I don't even recall how that happened.) What I do recall is how great it was to be in those shed-like spaces with the side doors rolled-up and the bay just outside. (I do remember that, in this large group of poets and writers and literary wonder-kinder -- at least in their own minds -- I was the one who figured out how to turn on the industrial lights so we could set up our booths and get to work).
They've tarted up one of the buildings to be more appropriate to it's new life, but the setting is just as wonderful as it was almost 38 years ago. The same sea gulls everywhere. The same seals or sea lions popping up now and then in the water between the piers and Alcatraz. The same blue sky and Mephistophelian serpentine (or Serpentinite) rock oozing out of the bay to form the foundation of the city (and wouldn't that literary connection explain so much about the city and even about Michel Foucault? The infernal origin of the material and that the official name even includes the word "serpent" is almost too good to be true.)
No comments:
Post a Comment