Interlude XLVI. Foucault - part 24 - épistème

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XLV. Faust

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Chapter 5 - In the Labyrinth cont...

p147

...In the Middle Ages, mazes supplemented moats as a line of defense around castles. In the Age of Reason, hedge mazes became an aristocratic diversion. And in every epoch, writers have grasped the possibility of forming out of words a labyrinth in which to hide. That a maze of language could also hold the reader “captive,” because “captivated,” was a possibility Foucault had learned from Robbe-Grillet, Roussel, and also from Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer and tutelary spirit whom Foucault would credit as the inspiration for The Order of Things.

The appeal of the labyrinth to the writer’s imagination was therefore doubtless manifold: a structure in which to hide, a line of defense, a machine of war, a source of amusement, a space of daimonic revelation, a place where a person might come to “think differently,” it facilitated, as a literary device, self-effacement and self-expression simultaneously.

It was in this spirit, Foucault speculated, that Roussel had taken such care to encipher the secret of his singular destiny in the books that he wrote, turning his prose into a highly personal maze that simultaneously concealed and revealed. The possibility of being “caught,” as Roussel once explained to his psychiatrist, was a part of the pleasure: “Practicing forbidden acts in private knowing that they are prohibited, risking punishment or at least the contempt of respectable people, that is perfection.”

At the same time, by carefully hiding the traces of a personal destiny, even the man who feared himself mad might join “the community of rational men,” as Foucault himself once pointed out. “Writing in order to have no face,” he could forge “an alliance without language between an anonymous desire and a knowledge of which the rules hide the empty face of the Master.” Through his books, he might then express his deepest sense of himself while remaining “the perfect stranger” -- a “man whose strangeness does not reveal itself.”

Reception.

p149

...In the interviews he gave in these pivotal months [after Les mots el les choses, later translated into English as The Order of Things, was published], Foucault emphasized the fit between his own work and the structuralist zeitgeist -- even while he quietly drew attention to some of the peculiarities of his own approach. He presents The Order of Things as a sequel and companion to Madness and Civilization, as a “history of resemblance, sameness, and identity” that supplements the earlier work’s history of difference, otherness, and dissociation.

p150

His new book thus offers a kind of post-Kantian “Critique of Impure Reason” that (like Kant’s Anthropology) deals with practices, institutions, and theories on the same plane” by looking for the “isomorphisms,” or similarities in form, that organize (into a kind of historical a priori) the field of experience in any epoch. In conducting his research, Foucault acknowledges, he had in mind such precursors as Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, and Dumezil -- all thinkers who showed, beneath the level of conscious meaning explored by Sartre and the phenomenologists, another level, unconscious and unthought, anonymous and impersonal, that regulated the play of meaning in advance. The human being is therefore not absolutely free (or absolutely responsible), as Sartre supposed, but always restrained, pinioned, snared in a web of language and practices beyond its control. In order to make plain the novelty of the domain he wishes to analyse, Foucault even coins a new term for it, “épistème,” borrowing from ancient Greek the word for knowledge (and the archaic linguistic root of the modern French and English words for theories of knowledge, “Épistémologie” and “epistemology”). And “episteme,” as Foucault defines it, is “an epistemological space specific to a particular period,” a general form of thinking and theorizing that establishes “what ideas can appear, what science can be constituted, what experiences can be reflected in philosophies, what rationalities can be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards.”

I kind of hate myself for really liking the notion of the “épistème.” For one thing, it does a wonderful job of explaining the obscurity of thought displayed by everyone from Heidegger to Lacan. Some of their positions you can’t even dismiss as nonsense because it’s impossible to comprehend what these positions even are. How many beliefs have been contingently true, relative to the circumstances of the moment, while objectively nonsense. Political thought, in particular, whether Marxist or Tory or Tea Party, most obviously exists in an épistème, like algae in a pond with very specific conditions. 

The épistème would seem to be related to “zeitgeist.” And that special, contagious feeling (or spirit) of the “Summer of Love,” The Castro in the 1970s, and even the mid-1990s Tech boom centered on South Park, has elements of both. The “logic” of those times was, to a great extent, local to just those months or years.

From the perspective of the new form of theorizing that Foucault’s latest work exemplifies, it seems evident that Sartre’s brand of existentialism belongs to a bygone era. A new generation, “not yet twenty during the war,” has supplanted, as Foucault explains, “the generation of Temps modernes that had been our law for thinking and our model for existing.” To this younger generation, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason seems “pathetic,” a doomed “effort of a nineteenth-century man to think through our twentieth century.” The syncretic humanism of the postwar era -- a moralistic fusion, he explains, of Sartre, Camus, and Teilhard de Chardin -- pretended to resolve problems it had not even understood: for example, “all those obsessions that absolutely do not merit being theoretical problems.” Forming a “monstrous alliance,” Sartre and Chardin spoke “in whose name? Man’s! who dares to speak of the evil of man!”

Far from being “evil” (or “mad”), something like an obsession with death was a logical outgrowth of the most advanced thought of our time: “Man would die from the signs that were born in him -- that’s what Nietzsche, the first one to see this, meant.” And though the analysis of the field of signs through the search for isomorphisms might seem hopelessly abstract, Foucault suggests that the outcome of this quest is something quite different: “The writers that please us the most,” he tells Madelieine Chapsal in 1966, “we ‘cold’ sytematizers, are Sade and Nietzsche -- those who, in effect, speak ‘of the evil in man.’ Are they not, also, the most passionate of writers?”

Does Foucault realize that épistème is a double edged sword? Isn't it also possible to read the thought of Foucault, and of the others like him who came of age during the Nazi occupation of France, as the symptoms of an intellectual Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? He claims that Sartre does not speak for him but does he speak for anyone who hasn't grown out of the same disturbed ground? You could compare Foucault to certain weeds that flourish on disturbed ground but are soon replaced by more "natural" forms of vegetation as the area recovers. I wonder if Foucault is popular in Palestine or Somalia?


Something else struck me as I was reading these last couple paragraphs... there are very few women in this story. Not a good sign. 

A discussion of pleasure and pain and death (and of the limits of each and of the connections between them), of suffering, where women do not have a voice makes me suspicious. I think we need to take a quick trip to India and look at Kali and maybe tantra.

Next: Interlude XLVII. Dark Goddesses.