Interlude VI. Foucault - part 2 - S/M & liminal space

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude V. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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

Continued from page 28...

Many, like Foucault, felt that S/M had been one of the most positive and constructive forces in their life -- a way of consensually expressing, and gaining a sense of mastery over, a host of otherwise taboo impulses. But due to the monstrous coincidence [?] of AIDS, these vibrant forms of eroticism had become fraught with potentially lethal consequences. Under these morbid circumstances, some resolved to change their sexual practices, embracing either terrified celibacy or a new moderation, cutting down on sexual contacts and avoiding the exchange of bodily fluids. But others, feeling confused or resigned -- or both -- expressed a defiant abandon, partying on, as one censorious eyewitness would later remark, “like the revellers in Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death.’”

The conditions were chilling. Still, in some bathhouses in San Francisco in the fall of 1983, in the eyes of someone disposed to see matters in this light, the scene on some nights may have strangely recalled that conjured up by Foucault ten years before, in his account of plagues and the macabre carnivals of death that the medieval writers imagined to accompany them: “Laws suspended, prohibitions lifted, the frenzy of time that is passing away, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they were recognized, allowing an entirely different truth to appear.”

As the lyrical intensity of this passage suggests, the possibility of what Foucault elsewhere called a “suicide-orgy” exerted an unusual fascination over him. Given the anxiety that AIDS continues to provoke, the singularity of Foucault's preoccupations must be stressed: most members of the gay and S/M communities would never have seen the situation in such terms. [At least not the ones who survive] Foucault, by contrast, had long placed death -- and the preparation for suicide -- at the heart of his concerns” summoning what he once called “that courage of clandestine knowledge that endures malediction,” he was evidently serious about his implicit lifelong conviction that “to comprehend life is given only to a cruel, reductive and already infernal knowledge that only wishes it dead.”

That fall, he later told friends, he returned to the bathhouses of San Francisco. Accepting the new level of risk, he joined again in the orgies of torture, trembling with “the most exquisite agonies,” voluntarily effacing himself, exploding the limits of consciousness, letting real, corporeal pain insensibly melt into pleasure through the alchemy of eroticism.

As Foucault seems to have been less forthcoming than Bataille about his personal experiences, I am left to fill in with scenes from the final volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time featuring the Baron de Charlus in Parisian S/M clubs during the Great War. (I’m not sure what either the child of La Haute Bourgeoisie or the scion of the bluest blue bloods would make of this comparison.) From “Charlus During the War”:

Suddenly, from a room isolated at the end of a hallway, there seemed to come smothered cries. I walked quickly in that direction and put my ear to the door. “I beg you, mercy! mercy! Have pity! Release me! Don’t hit me so hard!” a voice was saying. “I kiss your feet, I humble myself before you, I won’t do it again. Have pity on me!” “No, you worthless trash.” another voice replied. “And, since you bawl and crawl on your knees, we’re going to chain you to the bed. No pity!” And I heard the cracking of a whip, probably made still more cutting with nails, for I heard cries of pain. Then I noticed that this room had a small, round window opening on the hallway, over which they had neglected to draw the curtain; tiptoeing in the darkness, [this is during a time of zeppelin raids on Paris] I made my way softly to this window and there, chained to a bed like Prometheus to his rock, and being beaten by Maurice with a cat-o;-nine-tails which was, as a matter of fact, studded with nails, I saw before me M.de Charlus, bleeding all over and covered with welts which shewed that this was not the first time the torture had taken place. Suddenly the door opened and someone... entered -- it was Jupien [an acquaintance of the narrator and a friend of Charlus] He approached the Baron with a respectful air and a knowing smile. “Well, do you need me for anything?” The Baron begged Jupien to have Maurice go out for a moment...

“I did not want to speak in front of that young man [Maurice]. He’s a well meaning lad and does the best he can. But I don’t find him brutal enough...” ...”I happen to have that butcher here now.” Jupien suggested, “the man from the slaughterhouse [actually a hotel employee] who looks like Maurice; he just happened to drop in. Do you want to try him out?” “Oh yes, I’d be glad to ,” the Baron answered...

-Proust

I come back to Synesthesia again and again because it is so odd, but what if people like the Baron and Foucault sense “pain” differently than other people? We often hear of people with a high or low threshold for pain but what if for some people the difference is qualitative instead of quantitative? I'm not saying this needs to be true to explain the phenomenon of S/M, but we can't say with any degree of certainty that a masochistic person feels the same thing we would feel in similar circumstances.

Years later, in his roman a clef about AIDS, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, the French novelist Herve Guibert, at the time one of the people closest to Foucault, recounted how the philosopher in his tale had returned from a fall visit to California “eager to report on his latest escapades in the baths of San Francisco. ‘Those places must be completely deserted now because of AIDS.’ ‘Don’t be silly.’” the philosopher replies, “‘it’s just the opposite: the baths have never been so popular, and now they’re amazing.’” The menace in the air had created new complicities, a new tenderness, a new sense of solidarity: “‘Before, no one ever said a word; now, everyone talks. Each of us knows exactly why he is there.’”

p 29

But why was Michel Foucault there? If he already had the virus, as he perhaps suspected, then he might be endangering one of his partners. And if any of his partners, as was likely, had the virus, then he might be wagering his own life.

Was this perhaps his own deliberately chosen apotheosis, his own singular experience of “The Passion”? Does his conceivable embrace of a death-dealing “disease of love” reveal, as he implied that it would, the “lyrical core” of his life -- the key to his “personal poetic attitude”?

What exactly Foucault did in San Francisco in the fall of 1983 -- and why -- may never be known... Daniel Defert, for one, sharply disputes the general impression left by Herve Guibert, dismissing his novel as a vicious fantasy. Still, there seems little doubt that Foucault on his last visit to San Francisco was preoccupied by AIDS, and by his own possible death from it -- as Defert himself stresses. "He took AIDS very seriously," Says Defert: "When he went to San Francisco for the last time, he took it as a limit-experience ."

An ambiguous word, "experience" -- but also crucial for understanding the "enigmatic stitching" that ties together Foucault's death, life, and work. Near the end of his life, he briefly defined "experience" in this way: it was, he explained, a form of being "that can and must be thought," a form "historically constituted" through "games of truth."

In the spirit of Kant, Foucault sometimes analysed these "games" in their "positivity." By "Positivity" he seems to have had in mind how certain ways of thinking, by embodying a certain style of reasoning, ordered some aspect of existence or defined some field of knowledge. A system of thought acquires "positivity" in this sense when its propositions become open to scrutiny in terms of their truth or falsity. In The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things, Foucault showed, for example, how in the nineteenth century, clinical anatomy, economics, zoology, botany, and linguistics each crystallized as internally coherent "discourses," thereby constituting new disciplines of understanding, and regulating the conduct of inquiry in each of these branches of "positive" (or "scientific") knowledge. And at the end of his life, in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Foucault investigated how classical thinkers from Socrates to Seneca had elaborated their own, more personal regimens of "truth," trying to bring a measure of reason and just proportion to their existence, regulating the conduct of life in an effort to shape oneself into something "positive" (or "good").

Is that bit about “positive” clear to you? Because I find it confusing. Just the other day I skimmed through a much better explanation of “positive” and “negative” but where was it? “Liminal” and “liminal space” also come up and I think require some explanation. Here’s what I’ve picked up about “liminal”: The post-WWII years were a golden age for cultural anthropology as academics studied for the first time the diverse and previously isolated (left alone) cultures flourishing on the islands of the South Pacific. The impenetrable jungles of New Guinea resulted in strikingly different mini-cultures in almost every valley. The taboos and curious moral structures of these peoples fascinated anthropologists and forced everyone to question their own ethical assumptions.

One tradition common here, and also in Africa and Native America, was the “Rite of Passage” -- usually an ordeal that young people had to accomplish or survive before they could be accepted as adult members of their community. Sometimes the person’s life before and after this “liminal” experience was strikingly different (in some South Pacific communities, boys who had grown up in homoerotic bliss where contact with girls was taboo, suddenly learned -- to their disgust -- that contact with boys was henceforth taboo and they were now required to service their new female mates). This transitional process was divided into “pre-lininal”, “liminal,” and “post-liminal” phases. In the liminal phase, during the actual rite of passage, you had left behind the world of your childhood but had not yet reached the adult world. You were, temporarily, an outsider. While making this transition you could be thought of as inhabiting a liminal space.

While European cultures do have certain rites of passage, they tend not to be as drastic or mystical as what we find in other more “primitive” cultures. We congratulate ourselves for this (I know I’m happy about it) but clearly, if you look at some of the strange things people even in the West do -- I’m thinking here of body art/modification and gang and school hazing and the like -- there seems to be a “human” need for rituals and ordeals we thought we had reasonably gotten beyond.

Metaphorically, Foucault and others seem to believe themselves to be trapped in a pre-liminal experience and long to make the transition to whatever the post-liminal reality is like. Like people undergoing Trepanning they believe some ordeal (in Foucault’s case a very pleasurable ordeal, it seems) will bring them to a new state of being, a new understanding.

“Positive” and “negative.” I still can’t find it. Positive is, I think, meant in a scientific sense as in Scientific Positivism. “Positive” reasons have reference to the observable world. “Negative” reasons are mystical in character, for lack of a better word -- metaphysical might also work. I would love to have a good example including both... like in that text I can’t find.

Next: Interlude VII. The God Delusion.

Summer XIX. Literary associations

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer XVIII. English class character

On my breakfast table there is a pot of honey. Not the manufactured stuff sold under that name in shops, but honey of the hive, brought to me by a neighbouring cottager whose bees often hum in my garden. It gives, I confess, more pleasure to my eyes than to my palate; but I like to taste of it, because it is honey.

There is as much difference, said Johnson, between a lettered and an unlettered man as between the living and the dead; and, in a way, it was no extravagance. Think merely how one’s view of common things is affected by literary associations. What were honey to me if I knew nothing of Hymettus and Hybla? -- If my mind had no stores of poetry, no memories of romance? Suppose me town-pent, the name might bring with it some pleasantness of rustic odour; but of what poor significance even that, if the country were to me mere grass and corn and vegetables, as to the man who has never read nor wished to read. For the Poet is indeed a Maker: above the world of sense, trodden by hidebound humanity, he builds that world of his own whereto is summoned the unfettered spirit...

Alpha.

I do wish he wouldn't use the word "cottager" quite so much. I suppose the word didn't then have it's current "urban" sense.

This section is particularly truncated because his literary references happen to not mean much to me. But I take his point. I might substitute The Cobb at Lyme Regis -- which plays such a crucial role in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. It would be worth a visit, if you were at Lyme, in any case but the association with Austen would make it much more than just a quaint construction of old stone extending into the sea. Not only is there the association with the novel, but one assumes Miss. Austen herself must have been there at some point.

But honey... I rather think honey, and especially local honey, can stand on it’s own. I have a hard time imagining a poem that could make pesto or a buttery, garlicky pasta sauce taste any better. The descriptions of food in Hotel Paradise by Martha Grimes inevitably make me hungry, but I can’t say they “inform” my experience of foods similar to the ones she describes. Though that is not entirely fair since there is too much of a difference between what she describes and what I can actually find. It would also help if I were twelve.

That tree falling in the woods.

This morning I was thinking about the old question of the unobserved philosophical tree falling in the woods. The original idea was that what we mean by “a sound” is not sound waves generated by a tree falling but the perception of those sound waves by a brain connected to the right kind of sound wave detection equipment. Without that equipment and the right connections, you won’t hear the sound. It is also possible to “hear” a sound without sound waves being involved if your brain is playing tricks with you or, presumably, if it was directly stimulated in the proper way. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, mentions, without going into much detail, his theory that bats “see” sound. He also writes about the astonishing ability of dogs to distinguish slightly different chemical molecules with their sense of smell. What if an animal could “see” with it’s nose? Synesthesia teaches us that the correlation of our senses and what they sense is not as direct as we usually think. We now know that our senses are limited -- Dawkins likens our vision to the slit in a burka with almost all of the electromagnetic spectrum being invisible to us -- and that what we do see is filtered by our brains. What we see is, to a large extent, what we need to see to survive, not what is really “there.”

Once again the perceptions that we call colours are tools used by our brains to label important distinctions in the outside world. Perceived hues -- what philosophers call qualia -- have no intrinsic connection with lights of particular wavelengths. They are internal labels that are available to the brain, when it constructs its model of external reality, to make distinctions that are especially salient to the animal concerned. In our case, or that of a bird, that means light of different wavelengths. In a bat’s case, I have speculated, it might be surfaces of different echoic properties or textures, perhaps red for shiny, blue for velvety, green for abrasive. And in a dog’s or a rhino’s case, why should it not be smells? The power to imagine the alien world of a bat or a rhino, a pond skater or a mole, a bacterium or a bark beetle, is one of the privileges science grants us when it tugs at the black cloth of our burka and shows us the wider range of what is out there for our delight.

Suppose this is true. Suppose a bat experienced a tree falling as a flash of light either illuminating everything around it or temporarily blinding the bat. Would the tree have made a sound? Which brings us back to Phenomenology and Quantum Idealism again. From the perspective of Quantum Idealism, we have to ask a different question: Does the un-perceived tree in the forest even exist? From Husserl’s perspective we can’t say anything about the tree anyway. I suspect Husserl would say the falling “tree” does not make “a sound”.

But if the universe is, in a very real sense, consciousness, then there is no such thing as an unperceived tree falling. The particles (strings?) of the tree are linked to everything else in an essential way. The universe registers, in a small way, the falling of the tree. But does that falling tree make a sound?

This is why people ask me, “What are you thinking about?” at their peril.

Next: Summer XX. Jubilee + The Cat.

Spring VIII. Nature and society + special moments

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: VII. Roots of philosophy

The early coming of spring in this happy Devon gladdens my heart. I think with chill discomfort of those parts of England where the primrose shivers beneath a sky of threat rather than of solace. Honest winter, snow-clad and with the frosted beard, I can welcome not un-cordially, but that long deferment of the calendar’s promise, that weeping gloom of March and April, that bitter blast outraging the honour of May -- how often has it robbed me of heart and hope. Here, scarce have I assured myself that the last leaf has fallen, scarce have I watched the glistening of hoar-frost upon the evergreens, when a breath from the west thrills me with anticipation of bud and bloom. Even under this grey-billowing sky, which tells that February is still in rule: --

Mild winds shake the elder brake,

And the wandering herdsmen know

That the whitethorn soon will blow.

I have been thinking of those early years of mine in London, when the seasons passed over me unobserved, when I seldom turned a glance toward the heavens, and felt no hardship in the imprisonment of boundless streets. It is strange now to remember that for some six or seven years I never looked upon a meadow, never traveled even so far as to the tree-bordered suburbs. I was battling for dear life; on most days I could not feel certain that in a week’s time I should have food and shelter. It would happen, to be sure, that in hot noons of August my thoughts wandered to the sea; but so impossible was the gratification of such desire that it never greatly troubled me... I remember afternoons of languor, when books were a weariness, and no thought could be squeezed out of the drowsy brain; then would I betake myself to one of the parks, and find refreshment without any enjoyable sense of change. Heavens, how I laboured in those days! And how far I was from thinking of myself as a subject for compassion! That came later, when my health had begun to suffer from excess of toil, from bad air, bad food, and many miseries; then awoke the maddening desire for countryside and sea-beach -- and for other things yet more remote... Sound sleep (often in places I now dread to think of) sent me fresh to the battle each morning, my breakfast, sometimes, no more than a slice of bread and a cup of water. As human happiness goes, I am not sure I was not then happy.

Most men who go through a hard time in their youth are supported by companionship... Of my position, the peculiarity was that I never belonged to any cluster... The truth is that I have never learnt to regard myself as a “member of society.” For me, there have always been two entities -- myself and the world, and the normal relation between these two has been hostile. Am I not still a lonely man, as far as ever from forming part of the social order?

This, of which I once was scornfully proud, seems to me now, if not a calamity, something I would not choose if life were to live again.

Alpha.

One of the things I like best about Henry Ryecroft is that he is even more of an anti-social misanthrope than I am. I find myself thinking I tire of, and eventually avoid, the people I meet because they are mostly so much younger. That it is a conflict of generations. But then I remember I’m not much better pleased with the “friends” I’ve known for decades.

Society and friendship can be a wonderful thing, but it is often more wonderful in theory or in expectation than in reality.  One of the mixed blessings of belonging to an online community is that you learn how many people’s lives are racked by depression or anxiety. As a person who enjoys “fixing” or solving problems, I find people who are overwhelmingly depressed or anxious for no particular reason very frustrating. And since, in the long run, we are all alone anyway, I prefer Ryecroft’s peaceful isolation to the doubtful consolations of friendship.

And suppose you do achieve that perfect connection with another person. It is a wonderful thing, I don't know that anything is better, but what if you then lose that connection. Joyce Carol Oates was devastated by the death of her first husband who had been, I think she would have said, the better part of her self. Within a year she had found a new "better part of her self," and had moved on.

It puzzles me how few (male) characters in fiction achieve or even seek this sort of a connection. Faust (Goethe) is all about the Eternal-Feminine but seems to care very little about actual women. I could say the same for the male protagonists of The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq and for Bernard Marx in Brave New World. Marcel, in In Search of Lost Time, while usually consumed by a very particular sort of fetish that (in the novel) focuses on one female or another, is at least interested in women and ends up in some sort of a relationship with Gilbert. Christopher Tietjens, in Parade's End, for all his other failings, does form a connection with Valentine.

I try to tell my young online friends that, in the long run, and in the end, you are on your own, but I don't press it because no one wants to hear that, and in some cases I will be wrong... at least for a time.

Beta.

This section also reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Proust -- favorite because it resonates so well with my own feelings. Frustratingly, I can’t find the passage (although I’m almost certain it's in the 2nd volume).

Imagine the perfect quote here. Perhaps a taste of madeleine with a splash of tisane will help you with this. Adopt a French accent in your mind. You are a young, hyper-sensitive, young man on your first holiday at the beach in Brittany. You are overwhelmed by an aesthetic feeling as you contemplate some transitory view. You long to share this moment with another person but then you realize that if you had company the moment would quite possibly be ruined. You would be too involved in conversation to fully attend to the marvel before you (especially if your company was in any way connected to the Guermantes dynasty). The extent to which you were engaged with your friend would necessitate a compensatory disengagement from the very thing you wish to share. And it would be even worse if your friend was in a “mood,” and utterly impossible if your friend was the Baron.

The longing to share special moments with people close to you is so often spoiled, even when such a person is at hand, by our inability to comprehend another’s experience. Their experience of our “special moment” is not the same as ours. At best it may be a sort of translation. Worse, our “special moment” may be undermined by the mere presence of the other person.

Art -- painting, photography, literature, film, even music -- may be a better attempt to share those special moments with others. Within art we can control their experience and curate their impressions. We can try to bring to the experience the emotion we feel.

For Proust, in this passage, you need to keep in mind the character’s youth and delicate health; for Ryecroft, his lifetime of travail and his surprising respite and new found sense of peace.

And it gets worse... If our special moment is based on the evidence of our senses, as it most probably is, we have to consider the very real possibility that our friend does not perceive the world quite the way we do. Synesthesia is, in itself, freakish enough, but once you are aware of it you have to think that Synesthetes only know they are Synesthetes because their condition is so extreme. If it was less extreme, who would know? Just recently I took an online color test and discovered I can distinguish fewer colors than is normal. I'm not color blind, but where I see a shade of blue or red or green, most people can distinguish several shades of that color. I can't imagine any way this detracts from my life, but it does mean that I see the world slightly differently than others do.

If what I know as "red" is what other's know as "blue" is an entirely different question and one no one can answer.

Here's a fascinating passage from The God Delusion that Richard Dawkins really should contemplate some more:

What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data -- a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of that model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of world model from a walking, a climbing or a swimming animal... I've speculated, in The Blind Watchmaker and elsewhere, that bats may 'see' colour with their ears. The world-model that a bat needs, in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects, must surely be similar to the model that a swallow needs in order to perform much the same task... Once again, the perceptions that we call colours are tools used by our brains to label important distinctions in the outside world. Perceived hues -- what philosophers call qualia -- have no intrinsic connection with lights of particular wavelengths. They are internal labels that are available to the brain, when it constructs its model of external reality...

Next: Spring IX. Independence, forsooth!