|
COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Among the cultural inventions of mankind there is a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot exactly be activated, but at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain point of view which can be very useful as a tool for analyzing what's going on now--and to change it. We don't have to choose between our world and the Greek world. But since we can see very well that some of the main principles of our ethics have been related at a certain moment to an aesthetics of existence, I think that this kind of historical analysis can be useful.
--Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics"
It is easy to construct a story in which analogies as traditionally conceived have no place for Foucault in the writing of history. (1) Prompted by Foucault's own methodological proclamations in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," commentators have generally characterized genealogy as a skeptical, even nihilistic strategy for writing history. It is supposed to shatter our ability to identify a historical event in a continuous narrative, to identify with past subjects, to identify ourselves in some essential way. Indeed the purpose of history guided by genealogy, Foucault insists, "is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation." (2) And as we will see, classical analogy in the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition is often understood simply as a figure that establishes an element of identity over disparate objects or events.
So instead of writing history as reminiscence or recognition, one should, for instance, parody the buffoonery that supplied the French Revolution with Roman prototypes, romanticism with knight's armor, and the Wagnerian era with the sword of a German hero (160). Instead of fixing similarities in an unreflexive history of monuments and origins, genealogical history, according to Foucault, should correspond "to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates, and disperses, that is capable of liberating divergence and marginal elements--the kind of dissociating view that is capable of decomposing itself, capable of shattering the unity of man's being through which it was thought that he could extend his sovereignty to the events of his past" (153). In a word, difference, not identity, should serve as the affirmative principle when doing history, and synthetic pretension should be decomposed as it appears. Foucault actually might give the historian advice not unlike what Wittgenstein gives to a great architect in a "bad period": "Don't take comparability, but rather incomparability, as a matter of course." (3) For, as we will see, this is precisely what Foucault expressly tries to do in the second chapter of The Order of Things, "The Prose of the World," where he describes how the Renaissance hierarchy of analogies supposedly crumbles under the weight of a "Classical" science of order.
Foucault's practice, however, tells a very different story. His genealogies continually propose crucial, synthetic moments that produce new research domains. In fact, my claim can be put in the strongest terms: there is no Foucauldian method, whether genealogical or otherwise, without positive analogies. However, the way Foucault uses analogies is complex and atraditional; it builds upon the classical model while radically revising tradition in the direction of his own philosophy of language. Distinguishing Foucault's use of analogy from the classical prototype and Wittgenstein's philosophical anti-metaphysics, this article shows what sort of history one writes when relation is characterized in Foucault's positive, analogical mode.
Like the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, Foucault's detective work traces how analogies are situated, and both take the logic of reduction to task. Indeed, Foucault explicitly uses Wittgenstein's "kinship ties" to link, for instance, the modern pervert to the pre-modern libertine, yielding the following proportional formula: as the libertine was to the deployment of alliance, so the deviant is to the deployment of sex. (4) But neither for Wittgenstein nor for Foucault are formal resemblances simply read off the world and uniformly named, nor does language simply impose likeness. Resemblances appear first as ad hoc kinships, or sympathies, at which point they can be justified against the associated fields that they help compose. Wittgenstein sees these fields composed of various human practices, both discursive and non-discursive, some of which (logic and psychoanalysis, for example) systematically reduce resemblances to identities. But always the philosopher, Wittgenstein tested the limits of everyday language by way of a historical thought experiments rather than philology. In contrast, Foucault locates when particular identities were produced in language, what institutional conditions made them stick, and how they might be transformed in the writing of history.
The Persistence of Analogy
In the Renaissance as Foucault describes it, analogy had a potentially universal field of application, but this potential could never be realized fully because divine order was ultimately opaque. This limitation left man at the very center of a complete signifying system, but with only fragments of a decoding manual. Renaissance man was only "half of a universal atlas," as Foucault puts it, but he could nevertheless piece together a tremendous number of natural signs. Foucault recites a series of poetic observations drawn from Crollius's Traite des signatures:
Man stands in proportion to the heavens, just as he does to animals and plants, and as he does also to the earth, to metals, to stalactites or storms. Upright between the surfaces of the universe, he stands in relation to the firmament (his face is to his body what the face of heaven is to the ether; his pulse beats in his veins as the stars circle the sky according to their own fixed paths; the seven orifices in his head are to his face what the seven planets are to the sky); but he is also the fulcrum upon which all these relations turn, so that we find them again, their similarity unimpaired, in the analogy of the human animal to the earth it inhabits: his flesh is a glebe, his bones are rocks, his veins great rivers, his bladder is the sea, and his seven principal organs are the metals hidden in the shafts of mines. (5)
In the episteme shared by grammarians (such as Ramus), naturalists (Belon), physiognomists (Porta)--and, I will add, a theologian such as Cajetan--word, nature, and man could all be drawn together in a complex interlocking system of signification, the nodes of which would be marked ultimately by God's signature: "visible marks for the invisible analogies." It is, for instance, no accident that the walnut resembles the human head, for this is the iconic sign given to man that "wounds of the pericranium" can be cured by the thick green rind covering the shell of the fruit, and so on.
But as Foucault insists in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," no episteme completely closes upon itself, guaranteeing certain knowledge, eternal truth, or transparency of the system as a whole. And the job of the genealogist is ostensibly to draw out fissures in a given system, both internal and external. The holy "confusion" of Cajetan that we will see undermines the univocal predication of man, and God is introduced by Foucault in a different form as the Renaissance episteme begins to crumble. There always will be a "slight degree of non-coincidence" between resemblances, as Foucault puts it, an insurmountable misalignment between the graphics of the natural world and the graphics that form its discourse. And this internal limit to the system leads directly to external limits of the world. The whole world had to be explored if even the slightest of analogies was to be justified and finally take on the appearance of certainty, and thus from its very foundations, this knowledge was merely "a thing of sand" (30).
Now, given Foucault's radical stance regarding the absolute uniqueness of a given historical event, period, or culture, and given his pronouncement of a total collapse of the Renaissance episteme, one would not expect analogy to resurface in Foucault's corpus as an analytic tool. Nor should analogy reappear in Foucault's post-Renaissance episteme unless resuscitated as a politically motivated simulacrum--history as farce. "There is nothing now," Foucault insists, "either in our knowledge or in our reflection, that still recalls even the memory of that being (43, emphasis mine). Nothing, except perhaps literature--and even then "in a fashion more allusive and diagonal than direct." But recur analogy does. In what form, and to what end?
The key to answering these questions lies not in Foucault's explicit theoretical statements, but rather in his actual language of comparison and transformation. First, we must look at the terms Foucault uses to compare various discourses that compose one historical period as well as the objects that those discourses name. How, for instance, will Foucault justify his comparison of prisons, factories, schools, barracks, and hospitals--this illuminating synthesis that has generated research projects across the human sciences? Then we must look at what stays the same as one historical period gives way to another. So when...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
