The Birth of the Clinic & Raymond Roussel
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXXVIII. Foucault - part 18
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 5 - In the Labyrinth cont...
p133
...it would be a mistake to isolate... the literary and philosophical dimensions of Foucault’s work in these years. “Fiction does not exist because language is at a distance from things,” he explained in another essay published in 1963, carefully defining the scope of “fiction”: “Language is the distance.” It is as if words produced a kind of diffuse and artificially generated “light,” revealing that things exist while simultaneously reminding us of the “inaccessibility” of these things apart from language, “the simulacra that gives them their sole presence; and all language that instead of forgetting this distance is maintained in it, and maintains it in itself, all language that speaks of this distance by moving into it is a language of fiction.” As Foucault emphasizes, this “fictive” language, as he has defined it, can be put into play in “all prose and all poetry,” in “all novels and all reflection, without discrimination.”
That Foucault took seriously a convergence of fiction and “reflection” is suggested by the simultaneous publication, on exactly the same day in 1963, of The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault’s monograph on modern medicine, and Raymond Roussel, his study of the poet and novelist.
At first glance, the two works seem completely different. One is a work of history, the other a piece of literary criticism; one is empirical, the other transparently imaginative. Yet both works are “about space, about language, and about death.” And by analyzing different “games” in which “things and words are designated and withdrawn, betrayed and masked,” both works illuminate “the inexhaustible configurations of the domain common to language and being.”
The Birth of the Clinic & Marie Francois Xavier Bichat.
In The Birth of the Clinic, the language-game at issue involves the constitution, through the new doctrines and practices of modern pathological anatomy, of the human body as “the space of the origin and distribution of disease.” The chief architect of this new understanding, in Foucault’s account, was Marie Francois Xavier Bichat (1771-1802). By defining “a system of analytic classes for disease,” in part by classifying twenty-one different types of tissue, from arteries to the epidermis, Bichat enunciated a new “principle of deciphering corporeal space,” one that cast both the body and disease in a new light. Looking at the body in Bichat’s terms, disease ceases to be an alien “pathology that inserts itself in the body wherever possible, it is the body itself, become diseased.” Foucault calls this view a breakthrough to “a more genuinely scientific empiricism.” But he refuses to regard Bichat’s theory as an act of “epistemological purification,” describing it instead as a total “syntactical reorganization.” As Foucault writes, it is “not a matter of the same game, somewhat improved, but of a quite different game,” with quite different rules. And it is only thanks to these new rules that “the abyss beneath illness {le mal}” -- the constant presence of “death in life” -- can emerge “into the light of language.”
Raymond Roussel.
p131
Roussel’s language-game, as Foucault describes it, eerily mirrors that of Bichat. Like the scientist, the artist articulates a language in which death becomes a positive phenomenon, taking “positive,” as Foucault once put it, “in the strong sense”: in the writing of both men, “disease {la maladie} breaks away from the metaphysic of evil {du mal}, to which it had been related for centuries; and it finds in the visibility of death the full form in which its content appears in positive terms.” Like Bichat, Roussel affirms the constant presence of “death in life.” This presence, however, Roussel experienced not as an objective fact to be grasped through orderly inquiry, but rather as an insane fascination: on one occasion, after slitting his wrists in a bathtub, Roussel was pleased and surprised to find “how easy it was to die.” It was in a similar spirit of rapturous abandon that he apparently overdosed in 1933 on his drug of choice, barbiturates.
This is a subject also of interest to Mann, and to Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain. Hans quizzes the Hofrat, his doctor, about the process of death and makes a self-serving virtue of visiting the “moribund” at the sanatorium. In the same way that the ISS is constantly falling but at a rate that, combined with its speed, causes it to stay in orbit, you could think of the body as constantly dying while various life forces within the body -- not all of which share our DNA -- keep it from crashing. Of course if you wanted to view it from a glass half full perspective, even after death some aspects of life continue in the corpse -- not the growth of hair and nails, despite the stories -- but not all of our bacteria die as soon as we die.
In Foucault’s view, it is, paradoxically enough, the artist and not the scientist who most clearly reveals “the general law of the Game of Signs, in which is pursued our reasonable history.” The use of the word “game” here underlines the claim -- familiar from Wittgenstein, whose work Foucault knew in at least broad outline -- that language is part of a human activity, a “form of life”; its rules are accordingly not something fixed, given once for all; new types of language-games -- scientific, literary, moral -- come into existence, while others become obsolete, and, falling into disuse, are forgotten.
The invention of new language-games was something of a mania with Roussel, who elaborated his extraordinary and often sinister fantasies with the deadpan humor, and mock-scientific attention to detail, of a Rube Goldberg. A flamboyantly eccentric playwright, poet, and novelist -- and also a former patient of the well-known French psychiatrist Pierre Janet -- Roussel submitted himself to a variety of arbitrary but rigorous rules for composing his poems and novels. Obsessed with puns, he liked to build narratives around homophonic structures: words and entire sentences that sounded identical, yet had completely different meanings. In the New Impressions of Africa, his most widely read poem, “each canto starts off innocently,” as one critic has written, “but the narrative is constantly interrupted by a parenthetical thought. New words suggest new parentheses; sometimes as many as five pairs of parentheses ((((())))) isolate one idea buried in the surrounding verbiage like the central sphere in a Chinese puzzle. In order to finish the first sentence, one must turn ahead to the last line of the canto, and by working backward and forward one can at last piece the poem together.” ...
At first glance, it is hard to see how the suicidal “anguish” of this mad artist could remotely approach the general significance of Bichat’s scientific discoveries about disease, anatomy, and the structure of human tissues. But Foucault argues that “quite unique forms of experience (quite ‘deviant,’ that is to say, disorienting)” are necessary “to expose this bare linguistic fact” the vertiginous power of language “to say things -- all things,” and in this way to “make appear,” as if by magic, “things never before said, nor heard, nor seen.” Exploring these “bare linguistic facts” without the inhibitions of the scientist, the artist is able to reveal, and positively affirm, a previously “blind and negative side of an experience that surfaces in our time: -- the other side, as it were, of the human morbidity that modern medicine has turned into an object of scientific inquiry, through the language-game first devised by Bichat.
In effect, Roussel, through the work of art he made out of his death haunted life, and Bichat, through the object of knowledge he made out of the human corpse, both illustrate, conjointly, three crucial aspects of Foucault’s own understanding of language and the order of things:
p133
--Language alone makes possible order and reasoned knowledge of the world.
--At the same time, language makes unthinkable the unreal and unreasonable.
--Language therefore calls into question the world and ultimately itself in a dizzying spiral of possibilities and impossibilities, realities and unrealities, that may well climax, as it did for Roussel, in a mad and lyrical embrace of the void, oblivion and death -- “that formless, silent, unsignifying region where language can free itself.”
Language as a limiting factor is an interesting concept. Just as we can only "see" what our senses happen to reveal, we can only express -- or even think -- what language has words for. The commonplace about Eskimos having many different words for snow, for example, gives them, thanks to language, the ability to make distinctions it would be very hard for us to make. You could even think of the evolution of language as being like carving a sculpture: There are "figures" in the stone that can only be revealed by the tools and mind of an artist.
No comments:
Post a Comment