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.