Interlude V. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude IV. The Passion of Michel Foucault - part 1

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

I tend to confuse the stories of Sallie Tisdale (The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies -- links here) and Annie Dillard. When I recall a ghastly tale about insects it’s hard to remember which of the two infected me with it. Dillard’s parable of the Polyphemus moth is unforgettable (there’s a version in Pilgrim... and a slightly different version in An American Childhood which is perhaps more effective for standing more alone) and I can thank Dillard for the statistic that 10% of all insects are parasitic, but otherwise they tell a similar tale of natural abjection.

Some quotes from Pilgrim...

I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live, there’s a lot to think about... Theirs [the creeks] is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection...

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusion on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes, but everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

And speaking of fire, we do love a good blaze. We can’t take our eyes off a wreck or disaster. I’ve joked we “choose” to dump the crazy and defective on the streets where we can see them struggle -- but what if that’s true? What if “Care In the Community” is like bear baiting and dog fights? The Saw movie franchise and the Human Centipede suggests that we crave this and BDSM suggests that just watching isn’t enough -- hello Foucault.

If we build a particularly big “Man” on the Playa it’s because we want to see it burn. Is it the same for cities? Did the Japanese build the magnificent Yamato battleship and then sail it on a pointless mission of doom at least in part for the spectacle?

An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.

I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.

When the leaves fall the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed... All that summer conceals, winter reveals.

I’m getting used to this planet and to the curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully cruel.

The “worlds” created by art also take you away from the “actual” moment. To the extent you are captivated by music, a painting, a book, a film, you are oblivious to the world that is actually around you. The “moment” is like a cat trying to get your attention while you are busy doing something else.

I do it [study pond water] as a moral exercise... a constant reminder of the facts of creation that I would just as soon forget... These are real creatures with real organs, leading real lives, one by one. I can’t pretend they’re not there.

...it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous.

...the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine... But the question of who is thinking the thought is more fruitful than the question of who made the machine...

Just think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land a stained altar stone.

Are we dealing in life, or in death?

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me.

Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak... We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet... We are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die -- does not care if it grinds itself to a halt.

I’ve already used the quote above (in Autumn XIII. Stoics part 2) but I need to review it with Sartre and Foucault in mind. The task of being a moral creature in an amoral world was Sartre’s life work. While Sartre and Foucault often marched together at political rallies, I think Foucault was rather more comfortable with an amoral world. In fact I have the feeling he was at home there.

...if you want to live you have to die...

Creation itself was the fall, a burst into the thorny beauty of the real...

The creator is no puritan. A creature need not work for a living; creatures may simply steal and suck and be blessed for all that with a share -- an enormous share -- of the sunlight and air.

Another year has twined away, unrolled and dropped across nowhere like a flung banner painted in gibberish.

And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life... The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest... There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.

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

Interlude IV. The Passion of Michel Foucault - part 1

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude III. Georges Bataille

The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller 

Some quotes from the Anchor Books, Doubleday edition (1993):

p 26

...In the previous months [the summer of 1983], some of Foucault's closest friends -- doctors, lovers, gay friends already committed to practicing “safe sex” -- had urged him to take better care of himself, to watch what he was doing. But Foucault had ignored their entreaties. Keeping a check on himself -- particularly when he was in San Francisco -- was not his style.

Ever since his first visit to the Bay Area in 1975 [the year before I moved here], he had been enthralled by the gay community that flourished there. He had originally come to the West Coast to teach at the University of California at Berkeley. But gay colleagues soon enough drove him over the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, to Castro Street [where I worked in a bookstore from 1978-1983] and to the area around Folsom Street. In these neighborhoods, an unprecedented number of clubs, bars, and bathhouses, catering to a wide variety of sexual tastes, supported a defiantly public and exuberantly experimental array of different gay subcultures -- a spectacular result of the gay liberation movement that had first gathered steam in the late 1960s. As never before, Foucault felt free in San Francisco to explore his abiding interest in “forbidden pleasures.”

I was a curious observer of this scene. Besides working on Castro Street, most of my friends at the time were gay and involved in some aspects of this multifaceted scene. I heard lots of stories, lots of talk. It was obviously an exceptional time and the streets were electric with (mostly sexual) energy. I suspect the Haight-Ashbury had been rather similar during the Summer of Love. The South Park neighborhood even had a similar vibe at the peak of the first (“Wired”) Tech boom when all the little alleys were lined with startups and Wired magazine was still in its original offices at 2nd Street and South Park. You had the feeling of participating in something new and exciting, a once-in-a-lifetime experience that you needed to savor while you could.

I’ve written elsewhere about how I was noticing things that my gay friends either weren’t or, perhaps, didn’t want to notice. The litany of strange sex related diseases: hepatitis, amoebas, things doctors didn't even have proper names for. You didn’t need to be a medical genius to see that there were consequences to creating ideal circumstances for diseases to develop and spread. This scene was as tempting and welcoming to disease as to the people who flocked to the clubs and baths. 

The space across the light-well from our bookstore office was suddenly a medical clinic treating the peculiar afflictions going around, and there were others like it scattered all over The Castro. I suppose people in the Haight, as the Summer of Love progressed, must have noticed the drug dealers and subtle signs of hard drug abuse beyond just Pot and LSD. In South Park I also noticed that most of the startups lacked a dependable revenue stream and I couldn’t help wondering how long the Venture Capital cash would last... not long, as it turned out.

He returned to the Bay Area in 1979, in 1980, and in the spring of 1983, usually spending his days in Berkeley and his nights in San Francisco. And even as friends in Paris worried about his deteriorating health, he was looking forward to yet another trip to the west Coast in the fall of 1983. “It’s a simple pulmonary infection,” he reassured one of them: “As soon as I am in California, I will be better.”

By then, the gay community of San Francisco had become for him a kind of magical “heterotopia,” ["a place (antithetical to a utopia) where 'words are stopped in their tracks' and the comforting certainties of conventional knowledge dissolve" from Note 41.] a place of dumbfounding excess that left him happily speechless. Promising a welcome “limbo of nonidentity,” the city’s countless bathhouses enabled Foucault as never before to grapple with his lifelong fascination with “the overwhelming, the unspeakable, the creepy, the stupefying, the ecstatic,” embracing “a pure violence, a wordless gesture.” And in the interviews that he had granted in the last years of his life to the gay press, Foucault made no secret of his special interest in “S/M,” the consensual form of sado-masochistic eroticism that flourished in a number of San Francisco bathhouses. "I don’t think that this movement of sexual practices has anything to do with the disclosure or the uncovering of S/M tendencies deep within our unconscious,” he said in 1982: “I think S/M is much more that that; it’s the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously.”

It’s hard not to defer to a philosopher and historian who has studied so much and has such a personal interest in a topic, but the idea that S/M offered possibilities, “people had no idea about previously” seems unbelievable to me. Even if you define “previously” as before the 18th century, as I suspect he would, I think this is nonsense. For one thing, I rather think elements of S/M are rampant in many ascetic religious traditions going back way before the 18th century. Perhaps secular S/M is something new, but I would doubt even that.

By “the overwhelming, the unspeakable, the creepy, the stupefying, the ecstatic” I believe he is referring to what Julia Kristeva termed the “abject” and what Georges Bataille and the surrealists all but worshipped. It is hard for me not to see Foucault as a disciple of Bataille.

p 27

“I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn’t survive it,” Foucault explained in another interview that year: “Complete total pleasure... for me, it’s related to death.”

This sentiment -- that pleasure, for him, was somehow “related to death” -- had haunted Foucault throughout his life, as we shall see. It raised, both in his writing and in his conduct, “overwhelming” and “unspeakable” possibilities, which became even more overwhelming and unspeakable in San Francisco in the fall of 1983...

Next: Interlude V. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Interlude III. Georges Bataille

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude II. Admirals

(Quotes from Wiki) Georges Bataille renounced Christianity in the 1920s after having converted to Catholicism in 1914. He published scholarly articles on numismatics while working at the Bibliothèque Nationale. He published “essays on innumerable subjects (on the mysticism of economy, poetry, philosophy, the arts, eroticism).” “Initially attracted to Surrealism, Bataille quickly fell out with its founder André Breton... He was heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Marx, Marcel Mauss, the Marquis de Sade, Alexandre Kojève, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the last of whom he defended in a notable essay against appropriation by the Nazis.”

“...after his death [he] had considerable influence on authors such as Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers, and Jacques Derrida... His influence is felt most explicitly in the phenomenological work of Jean-Luc Nancy, but is also significant for the work of Jean Baudrillard, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, and recent anthropological work from the likes of Michael Taussig.”

The Accursed Share.

In economics he argued for the accursed share... “according to Bataille's theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which is destined to one of two modes of economic and social expenditure. This must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring, in the contemporary age most often in war, or in former ages as destructive and ruinous acts of giving or sacrifice, but always in a manner that threatens the prevailing system.”

“The notion of "excess" energy is central to Bataille's thinking. Bataille's inquiry takes the superabundance of energy, beginning from the infinite outpouring of solar energy or the surpluses produced by life's basic chemical reactions, as the norm for organisms. In other words, an organism in Bataille's general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity, normally has an "excess" of energy available to it. This extra energy can be used productively for the organism's growth or it can be lavishly expended. Bataille insists that an organism's growth or expansion always runs up against limits and becomes impossible. The wasting of this energy is "luxury". The form and role luxury assumes in a society are characteristic of that society. "The accursed share" refers to this excess, destined for waste.” I’ve previously talked about the Potlatch (and possibly the “Golden Years”) as being examples of the accursed share.

This idea of “excess” is fascinating to me as it goes against everything I’ve ever been taught in economics. Spending on the military, for example, is usually viewed as a disastrous waste of resources since there is no positive (productive) result. Capital is invested in something that doesn’t produce more capital. But, then again, I had already noticed (and perhaps commented on) the essential role WWII spending played in ending the Great Depression. That everyone in America, for all intents and purposes, after 1941 had decent paying work improved the lives of most people while also building up the participating businesses and even increasing dramatically the productive capital -- in the form of machinery to make things, for example -- of the nation. The nation, business (large and small), and most individuals were much better off in 1945 then they had been before 1941.

Even if you take the construction of medieval cathedrals as an example of the accursed share, the benefits to individuals (workers, tradesmen, and all the people who provided services to those workers and tradesmen) must have been immense. And afterwards these same people were probably much better equipped to tackle large building projects.

I believe I’ve also examined the beneficial consequences of conspicuous consumption, admitting that, as much as it makes me uncomfortable, that particular kind of consumption provides a lot of people with better jobs than they would have servicing the needs of the average person.

The larger, energy, interpretation of this idea also reminds me of how Robert Pirsig, in Lila, viewed life in general as consistently violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the law of gravity. Pirsig writes,

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems “run down” like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only “runs up,” converting low-energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep “running up” faster and faster...

The law of gravity... is perhaps the most ruthlessly static pattern of order in the universe. So, correspondingly, there is no single living thing that does not thumb its nose at that law day in and day out. One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution. Thus, while the simple protozoa just barely get around on their cilia, earthworms manage to control their distance and direction, birds fly into the sky, and man goes all the way to the moon.

Limit-experience.

Working in a French tradition of abjection reaching back to Baudelaire and his paradoxes - "O filthy grandeur! O sublime disgrace!" - Bataille was early struck by what he saw as "the fact that these two complete contrasts were identical - divine ecstasy and extreme horror". He went on to challenge surrealism with a kind of anti-idealism searching for what he called the impossible by breaking rules until you reached something beyond all rules.

In this way, he strove for what Foucault would call "the point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme". It was at the edge of limits where the ability to comprehend experience breaks down that Bataille sought to live. Wiki

The Pineal Eye.

The notion of a "pineal-eye" is central to the philosophy of the French writer Georges Bataille, which is analyzed at length by literary scholar Denis Hollier in his study Against Architecture. In this work Hollier discusses how Bataille uses the concept of a "pineal-eye" as a reference to a blind-spot in Western rationality, and an organ of excess and delirium.[39] This conceptual device is explicit in his surrealist texts, The Jesuve and The Pineal Eye. Wiki

L'histoire de l'oeil.

Wiki

Abjection.

Drawing on the French tradition of interest in the monstrous (e.g., novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline), and of the subject as grounded in filth (e.g., psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan), Julia Kristeva developed the idea of the abject as that which is rejected by/disturbs social reason - the communal consensus that underpins a social order. The "abject" exists accordingly somewhere between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, representing taboo elements of the self barely separated off in a liminal space.

According to Kristeva, since the abject is situated outside the symbolic order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience, as with the repulsion presented by confrontation with filth, waste, or a corpse - an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject. Thus the sense of the abject complements the existence of the superego - the representative of culture, of the symbolic order: in Kristeva's aphorism, "To each ego its object, to each superego its abject".

From Kristeva's psychoanalytic perspective, abjection is done to the part of ourselves that we exclude: the mother. We must abject the maternal, the object which has created us, in order to construct an identity. Abjection occurs on the micro level of the speaking being, through his/her subjective dynamics, as well as on the macro level of society, through "language as a common and universal law". We use rituals, specifically those of defilement, to attempt to maintain clear boundaries between nature and society, the semiotic and the symbolic, paradoxically both excluding and renewing contact with the abject in the ritual act.

The concept of abjection is often coupled (and sometimes confused) with the idea of the uncanny, the concept of something being "un-home-like", or foreign, yet familiar. The abject can be uncanny in the sense that we can recognize aspects in it, despite its being "foreign": a corpse, having fallen out of the symbolic order, creates abjection through its uncanniness - creates a cognitive dissonance. Wiki

Next: Interlude IV. The Passion of Michel Foucault - part 1.