As I read this unique study, I kept asking myself how I could reduce it to a meaningful comment. For some reason I came up with a thought that does not bear directly on Foucault’s work but may have some relation to it.
The thought was: Literature is that which otherwise would not be said.
I turned this thought over in my mind and was not sure that I knew how I could contradict it and might possibly believe it. In fact, I am still wondering if I will use it as my motto instead of the one that appears at the top of this blog: Why pick up a pen if not to change the world?
The point may be that there is in the world a division between two modes of speech: that which is utilitarian and that which is not. The utilitarian must be said. Pass me the salt. I need aspirin. Are you going my way? The gross national product is 14.5 trillion dollars. These are useful statements and need saying. Statements that do not need saying are everything we think about the world and cannot even express except indirectly, through stories, or poems, or plays. Now, as we know, literature originally was closely aligned with religion, as were all the arts, but Foucault pinpoints a 16th-18th century period in which the divinity of literature was cast aside, and the post-Renaissance rumble that came to be “life today” began expressing itself.
He is not preoccupied with literature or its fate–I am– but he pursues an analytic method that sidelines it in a curious and interesting way. He choses the word “archeology” advisedly. What he is looking for is a kind of sedimentary evidence of change that propelled us into the modern age, and he seeks to find it in odd pairings like grammar on the one hand and exchange on the other. His focus on grammar, and “speaking,” is profoundly important to this study. The core insight here is that humankind experienced a shift through the Renaissance away from “likeness” to “representation.”
“Likeness” is a two thousand year old way of understanding the world. This is like that. This is similar to that. Therefore this and that are related. One can never fully abandon that mode of thought but thought itself is more or less unlike anything. When we speak or write, we are using grammatical conventions to represent thought. Thought is faster than its written or oral expression; it is instantaneous and sometimes has to wait a long time for someone to give it grammatical form, which is merely a representation of thought, not thought itself. So words come to signify something and do so arbitrarily and in those 16th-18th centuries referred to above, we began to realize that there was no such thing as a universal grammar that expressed itself uniformly through all post-Babel languages. As economies burgeoned, we also faced a challenge we still have not mastered: what is the value of something? Is there a universal value? Gold, for instance? Silver? Not really. Think of going into your driveway and getting into a solid gold car. It would go nowhere, weighing too much. But if we perform two operations that Foucault attributes to the segment of human archeology on which he is focused, we can solve the problem of gold: first, we assign it mathematical values, and then we establish an order that encompasses these values. Again, this is imperfectly achieved even today, otherwise we would not have billionaires profiting from what are called exchange rate fluctuations. But we have moved from likeness–fool’s gold to real gold–to representation grounded in the relative stability of mathematics and order.
When I was in eighth grade I learned something called the “new math.” I was taught that you could perform any mathematical operation on an other than decimal system. This proved abysmally pointless except that tonight I recall that our standard math is arbitrary, as is the grammar of one language versus another.
This is a long, erudite, possibly correct book. Foucault has had his ups and downs as a socio-intellectual historian and philosopher. Without question, he has done his homework and there are ample instances of him supporting his thesis with myriad persuasive examples. His focus is not on literature. His focus is on explaining the zeitgeist that unified disparate disciplines in creating our analytic, empirically-based and yet highly relative and somewhat arbitrary modern world. He makes the point at the end, per Nietzsche, that we may wake up some day and be other than we are, throwing out all of our presuppositions, and establishing new methods for representing our thoughts, or our forms of knowledge.
I tend to think he is right up to a point in this. When I publish this comment, it will be available worldwide. Very few people will read it, but still, those who do will be joining me in a global community that could conceivably chuck the nation state idea and turn its back on the idea of monetizing the air we breathe (carbon marketing) . . . or accept the idea of monetizing air. I don’t know. What I do know is that there is a connection between those of us who read and think and my general reaction: Literature is that which otherwise would not be said. We did not need Foucault in a utilitarian sense, but we do need writers whose knowledge and curiosity are so great that the things about which we are both unaware and incapable of expressing do get said. That’s literature, and ultimately it may change the world.
Robert Earle
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