John Walker

University of Toronto
jwalker@epas.toronto.ca

From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence–we have to create ourselves as a work of art.

 

-Michel Foucault

Introduction/Apologia

 

The 1990s have to this point occasioned a new space, a new opportunity for those who are still interested to (re)read the works of French critic/philosopher Michel Foucault. James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault, for instance, a meticulously researched and well considered book, calls into question North American “Foucauldian” scholarship, which he feels

 

enshrined Foucault as a . . . canonic figure whose authority (the authors) routinely invoked in order to legitimate their own brand of "progressive" politics. Most of these latter-day American Foucauldians . . . are committed to forging a more diverse society in which whites and people of colour, straights and gays, men and women . . . can . . . all live together in compassionate harmony--an appealing if difficult goal, with deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. (384)

 

Miller finds Foucault’s “progressive” followers to be victims of their own misreadings, willful or otherwise, of a thinker whose transfigurative radicality stretches far beyond “accepted” limits. “Unless I am badly mistaken” Miller writes, “Foucault issued a brave and basic challenge to nearly everything that passes for “right” in Western culture–including everything that passes for “right” among a great many of America’s left-wing academics” (384).

 

Even more controversial on this issue than Miller is Camille Paglia, whose Sexual Personae has of late caused such a stir in academic circles. In her earlier provocative essay, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” a lengthy and often hilarious skewering of postmodern scholarship’s excesses, David Halperin becomes the unlucky symbol of all that has gone wrong (in Paglia’s view) with North American academia. Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality is here lampooned as the soppiest sort of politically correct, liberal-humanist scholarship, with actual knowledge and research taking a back seat to the recitation of currently fashionable dogma concerning the fate of the marginalized and disempowered in Western society.

 

Who is ulimately culpable, in Paglia’s eyes, for the sloppy scholarship of Halperin and others like him? None other than Michel Foucault.

 

Paglia dismisses Halperin as a mere Foucault acolyte, one of those “well-meaning but foggy humanists who virtually never have the intellectual and scholarly preparation to critique Foucault competently,” but who instead merely rehash the “Big Daddy’s” own shaky (in her opinion) arguments in a quest for personal legitimacy (“Junk” 174). Supporting Paglia’s depiction of Halperin as a self-appointed defender of the Foucauldian faith is his own somewhat petulant criticism of Miller’s book recently published in Salmagundi.¹

 

At first glance, then, it appears that nothing could be more diametrically opposed than the views of Paglia and Foucault: Paglia goes to great lengths to legitimate such a notion, and her most vocal critics often fit snugly (smugly?) into the “American Foucauldian” category delineated by Miller, creating the impression of a sort of binary split between the two camps.

 

What I have found, however, upon a close reading of key texts by both authors, is the reversal of this idea, a collapsing of the supposed space between the two. My “positive” Paglian reading of Foucault will suggest that, contrary to what Paglia herself has said, Michel Foucault’s work and life are the epitome of the aesthetic propounded in Sexual Personae, an aesthetic which finds its culmination in dandyism: rather than opponents, they are actually comrades in transgression and decadence, fighting what is forever fated to be a losing battle “against nature.”

 

The Problem with Power

 

“The soul is the prison of the body” (Discipline 29). It was with this famous line from his critically lauded 1975 opus Discipline and Punish that Michel Foucault solidified his fame among post-Woodstock Rousseauian academics in North America. Rousseau’s theory, as enunciated in The Social Contract and other works, that the human subject was basically an innocent victim of corrupt societal forces, seemed, at least, to dovetail neatly with Foucault’s expressed view that, contrary to Christian theology, what was thought of as the human soul was not something “born in sin and subject to punishment” but was rather a phantom imposed from without by “methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint” and thus a key factor “in the mastery that power exercises over the body,” or “bio-power” (29).

 

In the Rousseauian/hippie slang of post-1960s radicals, “getting back to the garden” meant isolating and removing these power operations so that the human subject could live in a democratic, mutually caring, “natural” state of equanimity and bliss. “Power” thus became a catch-all phrase for converted Foucauldians, begetting seemingly endless studies isolating the fate of its “victims” within the patriarchal confines of WASP history and literature. Or as Paglia puts it, for Foucault and his supposed coterie of social constructionists, “power becomes a ‘squishy pink-marshmallow word’ which ‘caroms around picking up lint and dog hair’ but ultimately leads nowhere” (“Junk” 225). Paglia’s expression of disdain for utopian liberal theories (she calls Sexual Personae “a book written against humanism” [“Cancelled” 106]) is hardly surprising, coming from an unabashed fan of Nietzsche and Sade. Yet the alignment of Foucault, who claims the same influences, with such theories is quite problematic.

 

Take, for instance, Foucault’s derisory comments on humanism during an interview in 1971: “In short, humanism is everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power: it prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized” (“Revolutionary” 221-2). Humanism is for Foucault “antiquated,” an “insipid psychology” whose emphasis on the benign goodness of the originary subject constitutes a trap, fixing the individual within a binary good/evil framework which guarantees nothing but continued subjection (Miller 172). In the interview, he goes on to advocate the liberation of the subject’s will-to-power through “desubjectification,” or limit-experience brought about through both political and cultural means, including:

 

the suppression of taboos and the limitations and divisions imposed upon the sexes . . . the loosening of inhibitions with regard to drugs; the breaking of all the prohibitions which form and guide the development of a normal individual. I am referring to all those experiences which have been rejected by our civilization or which it only accepts in literature. ("Revolutionary" 222; emphasis mine).

 

This is Foucault’s invocation of the realm identified by Nietzsche as the “Dionysian,” which for humanists may conjure up visions of a pastoral utopia, but, for both Foucault and Paglia, evokes something far more dangerous indeed. “The Dionysian,” as Paglia says, “is no picnic” (“Sexual” 7).

 

Nietzsche, Apollo, Dionysus

 

Any “positive” co-reading of Foucault and Paglia must consider Nietzsche, a seminal figure in the (remarkably similar) formative genealogies of both critics. Nietzsche’s reformulation of the Greek myths of the gods Apollo and Dionysus is central to the thought of each. Beginning with The Birth of Tragedy, he organizes existence around two binary drives, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, “formative forces arising directly from nature” which are later depicted by the “human artist” (24). Apollo is for Nietzsche “the god of all plastic powers,” the “principium individuationis” who fixes the limits of self and culture through the illusion of form, an artificer (21-2). Dionysus, on the other hand, represents the entire chaotic realm of eternal motion and flux which form strives to control, obscure, and deny. Transgression into the Dionysian realm risks the disintegration of the individual subject (a state of “madness”) and its subsequent reintegration into the whole: “The mystical jubilation of Dionysus” states Nietzsche, “breaks the spell of individuation and opens a path to the maternal womb of being” (97).

 

The dichotomy which emerges from Greek culture and continues through the history of the West, then, is a nature/culture opposition: the Apollonian Socrates introduces the “illusion that thought . . . might plumb the farthest abysses of being and even correct it. . . . strong in the belief that nature can be fathomed” (93-4). Western art, as a mirror of the human psyche, becomes in part a record of this basic struggle and the differing responses to it in various epochs. In The Birth of Tragedy, at least, Nietzsche implies that both drives should unfold in a sort of perpetual cycle or spiral: “Only so much of the Dionysian substratum of the universe” he says, “may . . . be dealt with by that Apollonian transfiguration; so that these two prime agencies must develop in strict proportion, conformable to the laws of eternal justice” (145). Later, in response to what he perceives as an imbalance in Apollo’s favour originating with the Age of Reason, Nietzsche places greater emphasis on the Dionysian, equating it with the all-important will-to-power (Hollingdale 198-9).

 

Both Foucault and Paglia subscribe, with slight differences in emphasis, to this Nietzschean formula. Miller notes Foucault’s basic concurrence with Nietzsche’s binary thesis that “every human embodies a compound of nature and culture, chaos and order, instinct and reason . . . symbolized . . . by Dionysus and Apollo” (69). Almost all of Foucault’s work is concerned on some level with variations on this theme, the Apollonian drive variously taking the names “limit” (i.e., “Preface To Transgression”) and “power” (Discipline and Punish). The Apollonian, in contrast to the timeless, immanent realm of the Dionysian, is a historical force, embedded within our culture in a tangled network of conflicting paths “crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers” (“Space” 249). Characterized by the use of “reason” in the post-Enlightenment era, it actively de-limits the chaotic flux of the Dionysian and produces both society, on the macrocosmic level, and personality, or “the subject,” on the level of the individual. “I think,” says Foucault

 

that the central issue of philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century has always been, still is, and will, I hope remain the question: What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and its dangers?. . . . If it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning of this rationality risks sending us into irrationality. . . . if critical thought itself has a has a function . . . it is precisely to accept this sort of spiral, this sort of revolving door of rationality that refers us to its necessity . . . and at the same time, to its intrinsic dangers. ("Space" 249)

 

Within our current Western episteme (or historical period), one characterized by a post-Enlightenment faith in reason and concomitant loss of belief in God, Foucault locates sexual experience as the final borderline lying between Apollonian rationality and the Dionysian realm of the unknown. As we shall see, he valorizes those writers and philosophers whose lives and works reside at the “limit of madness–astride the line separating reason from unreason, balanced between the Dionysian and the Apollonian,” where it is possible to glean information beyond this binary split and then transmit its dissonant content to others (Miller 107). Miller goes so far as to state: “I take all of Foucault’s work to be an effort to issue a license for exploring . . . and also as a vehicle for expressing . . . this harrowing vision of a gnosis beyond good and evil, glimpsed at the limits of experience” (459). As we will see, however, Foucault, unlike Nietzsche, does not end in a full embrace of Dionysus, but instead comes to regard the manipulation of Apollo by the subject as key concept.

 

Camille Paglia devotes an entire chapter of Sexual Personae to the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus, and explicitly adds an archetypal sexual element to the equation which remains implicit in Nietzsche’s analysis (his comparison of the Dionysian to the “maternal womb” of nature being one example). For Paglia, on the symbolic level, the Apollonian is a masculine swerve away from “mother nature” (no idle cliche for her): the Western construction of identity, of culture, of artifice, emanates from man’s desire to repel the murky, “daemonic” liquidity from which he sprang and to which he must finally return. Paglia’s sexualization of Apollo and Dionysus provides an interesting angle from which to approach Foucault’s own theory and praxis of aesthetic transgression, or “Apollo Daemonized,” as she calls it (Sexual 489-511). This is an Apollonianism at the furthest threshold of extremity, one which runs the risk of a complete implosion back into the Dionysian–nature’s final revenge.

 

Breaking Down The Subject: The “Experience Book”

 

Foucault’s path to decadent enlightenment entails a double movement: first, the realization of what I will (somewhat ironically) call “true nature”–the chaos of Dionysus–and the resulting “desubjectification” or dissolution of the subject; secondly comes what Paglia calls the “daemonization of Apollo,” in which the subject seizes control of what Foucault calls the “author-function” and (re)creates itself as pure exteriority–an objet d’art.

 

For Foucault, “writing,” be it historical, philosophical or literary, in our modern era finds its value in radicality, in contesting the underlying assumptions of Western culture. The momentary dissociation of those lines which constitute and enclose the Western subject or personality is the aim of the “experience-book,” which attempts “through experience to reach that point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or extreme” (Marx 31). Some of its key agents appear frequently throughout Foucault’s work: Nietzsche, Sade, Bataille. “It is this de-subjectifying undertaking, the idea of a ‘limit-experience’ that tears the subject from itself, which is the fundamental lesson I’ve learned from these authors” states Foucault, underscoring the centrality of this concept for his own work. (31-2).

 

In early essays such as “Preface to Transgression” and “Language To Infinity,” Foucault, like the poststructuralist version of Roland Barthes, luxuriates in the notion of a textual space composed of a self-referential language liberated from any grounds, exulting the primacy of the signifier, its groundless and irreducible plurality. Such texts, defined in The Order of Things as “heterotopias,” “dessicate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source” (xviii). The heterotopic text, then, is a text at the limits which consistently threatens to violate its ordered Apollonian boundaries. This happens, for instance, at the extremes of Bataille’s erotic prose where language “arrives at its confines, overleaps itself, explodes and radically challenges itself in laughter . . . at the limit of its void, speaking of itself in a second language in which the absence of a sovereign subject outlines its essential emptiness and incessantly fractures the unity of its discourse” (“Preface” 48).

 

Foucault’s heterotopic “experience-book” is an active agent, a work of “direct personal experience” (including the experience of writing) rather than a dry theoretical exercise (Marx 38). The end result of this experiential process is the knowledge that the “truth” of language and the life it represents is one of pure fictionality, exterior and irreducible to any singular, definable, and immanent reality (which is not the same thing as saying that this “reality” [nature–the Dionysian] doesn’t exist–a key point). Skittering across the surface of the world, the empty bodies of both language and humans create meaning through collision, through the persuasiveness of impact. The ‘experience-book’ thus works simultaneously as both theory and praxis: the author/subject becomes dissociated through the act of creating this heterotopic labyrinth, the result being subsequently transmitted to others as an “invitation . . . to slip into this kind of experience” (Marx 33, 36, 40; see also The Discourse On Language 215).

 

What we find, I believe, upon examination of some of Foucault’s key works, is that this “de-subjectifying” experience mirrors the processes of mystical schools such as Buddhism which pursue the breakdown of the ego through direct means such as meditation, resulting in the recognition that the material world and the ‘meanings’ we assume inhere within it (including the meaning of the “I,” the ego-self that operates within that world) are maya, or illusion. Foucault remarks in a 1978 interview that the whole problem of de-subjectification is directly related to the operations of “mysticism,” which he feels are analogous to his task of liberating a “kind of glimmering,” an “essence,” through the workings of the experience-book (Miller 305). Miller notes that, when confronted by an audience of bewildered American post-structuralists regarding this realm of “occult”–or literally, “unknown”–essence (surely a sin of the greatest magnitude in their eyes!), Foucault “had trouble specifying” just what he meant, but also refused to back down (305). Yet those so troubled by the philosopher’s stance here only betray their ignorance of his work. Gilles Deleuze, who as Paul Bove points out, “associates Foucault with some prophetic visionary capacity” (“Foreword” xxxii), points out that the nature/culture, rational/irrational, Apollo/Dionysus spiral “from the beginning (was) one of Foucault’s fundamental theses.” For Foucault, he says, there exists a binary split between the ultimately indecipherable forms of “visible” content (nature) and forms of articulable expression (language), “although they continually overlap and spill into one another in order to form each new stratum of form of knowledge” (Deleuze 61, 70).

 

The strategic avoidance of certain key terms or organizing concepts (such as Apollo and Dionysus, or the language of Eastern mysticism) is, it seems, a central feature of French post-structuralism, obscuring any underlying notions of system and totalization, concepts which the school as a (very loose) whole ostensibly rejects. It also reveals an anxiety of influence, a burning desire to appear wholly original and “difficult” at all times. This in part explains the supposed “gulf” dividing Foucault and Paglia.

 

Paglia prides herself on verbal directness. Far less obliquely than Foucault, for instance, she places the aforementioned binaries within a mystical framework, correctly pointing out that much of the deconstructive method has previously been “massively and coherently presented . . . in Hinduism and Buddhism” (“Junk” 214). In the religions of the East, she says, “the unenlightened mind sees things in terms of form, but the enlightened mind sees the Void . . . cf. the Apollonian versus Dionysian dichotomy in the West” (“East” 151). Paglia makes connections; Foucault, whose entire premise, as Hayden White points out, is rhetorical (114), obscures them: “Who ever thought he was writing anything but fiction?” Foucault asks (Marx 33). This is why some liberal humanist academics are able to embrace Foucault: they are misled by his deliberate evasiveness. His distaste for the term “nature” (human or otherwise), especially, leads them to believe that he sees life shaped only by an external power which (de)forms pristine, innocent subjects into tattered, deformed victims of power, a totalized Apollonian universe. Paglia, accepting this misreading as accurate, ends up mistakenly pummeling a potential ally.

 

De-Structuralism: Discovering “True Nature”

 

In reading Foucault, it is central to differentiate between concept of the unified subject, the self as an Apollonian construct, and a human nature which, in contrast, is revealed to be part of that limitless realm of form-less essence (or “void”) which precedes and follows the material world of bodies (in Eastern mysticism, this essence is called Atman, and the larger realm, Brahman). As he points out in his touchstone essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” it is the task of the “genealogical historian” to scramble received notions of a “true” self at the base, of a “nature” or “soul” which “pretends unification or . . . fabricates a coherent identity” (81). Through the movements of the experience-book, this “natural self” is revealed not to be a unified, coherent whole, but instead a Dionysian conundrum, a tangled subjectivity; not “a possession that grows and solidifies, (but) . . . an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within and underneath” (82). The body, as “the locus of this dissociated self” and thus inseparable from it, is thus revealed to be “a volume in perpetual disintegration” (83).

 

Paglia’s view of nature basically coincides with Foucault’s. True nature, or the “chthonian,” is at base is nothing benign, but rather a “grueling erosion of natural force, flecking, dilapidating, grinding down, reducing all matter to fluid, the thick primal soup from which new forces bob, gasping for life” (Sexual 30). This residue from which humanity springs poses a constant threat for a people who confuse societally constructed identities, or personae, constructed in defence, with Dionysian human “nature”: “We speak of falling apart, having a breakdown . . . getting it all together” Paglia says. “Only in the West is there such conviction of the Apollonian unity of personality. . . . But I say that there is neither person, thought, thing, nor art in the brutal chthonian” (104, 73)

 

Foucault agrees: this search for “the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature” is burst asunder by the genealogist’s revelation that nature contains not “a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that (things) have no essence, or that their essence was fabricated . . . from alien forms” (78). For both Foucault and Paglia, it is this act of fabrication (the “ordering” process which becomes a Foucauldian buzzword: The Order of Things; “The Order of Discourse”) issuing forth not in an isomorphic relation, but in the line of defense and control versus the unknowable, which informs our problematic Western rationalism.

 

True nature, or Dionysian reality, is thus identified as the “non-place” of mutation, where rules are formed, transgressed, and re-formed. Embracing the language of Eastern mysticism, Paglia notes that ultimate reality is “the space that holds all that happens. . . . sunyata, voidness” (“East” 151). This “void” then, ultimately has no discernible connection to events occurring within it, and its eruptions into the Apollonian sphere are always revolutionary: “Suddenly, things are no longer perceived or propositions articulated in the same way” (Deleuze 85). As a result, “only a single drama is ever staged in this ‘non-place’: the endlessly repeated play of dominations” which strive to arrest its flux, becoming “fixed, throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations . . . and gives rise to the universe of rules” (“Genealogy” 85).

 

It is, then, not a question of metaphysics, of uncovering something eternal and true underlying any given set of rules, for true nature can never be deciphered. The philosophy of Nietzsche, the writings of Sade and Bataille, and Foucault’s own genealogical histories thus expose the structures of “civilized” life (including language) as fictions whose successive “interpretations” fix its limits in “the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which . . . (have) no essential meaning” (“Nietzsche” 86). As Paglia explains, this Apollonian power-play is paradoxical: rules and order have proven to be humanity’s greatest defense against the void, serving as the basis for religion, ritual, and art; however, contrary to current politically correct, liberal-humanist thinking, all of these modes, including art, are in no way exempt from the amorality and cruelty inherent in the application of the arbitrary and empty “rules” which are its basis. “Art,” she says,

 

is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature. . . . Art is order. But order is not necessarily just, kind or beautiful. Order may be arbitrary, harsh, and cruel. Art has nothing to do with morality. . . . Before the Enlightenment, religious art was hieratic and ceremonial. After the Enlightenment, art had to create its own world, in which a new ritual of artistic formalism replaced religious universals. . . . The artist makes art not to save humankind, but to save himself. (Sexual 29)

 

The artist, as a creator of worlds whose laws are self-contained, is thus necessarily engaged in transgression: freeing the subject(ed) through the dispersal of inherited, stultifying rules, s/he must formulate the world anew, impose a new interpretation, a counter-discourse. Rather than deconstruction, I would label this spiral de-structuralism, a movement encompassing both structure and its antithesis.

 

Astride The Line: Sade

 

For both Foucault and Paglia, the Marquis De Sade’s work initiates the de-structuralist spiral: his libertines not only realize true nature, but also sow the seeds of the movement “against nature,” resulting in a denaturalized art-world wherein, according to Foucault, “every language that has been effectively pronounced” has been consumed and then “repeated, combined, dissociated, reversed, and reversed once again, not toward a dialectical reward . . . but a radical exhaustion” (“Language” 61-2). For Sade, limits are not defined by religion, as God has been decentered by the emergence of Enlightenment “man,” who now becomes the raison d’etre of the universe. It is thus “man’s” most profound, and ultimately inexplicable, Dionysian experience–sex–which marks the borderline of rationality, where thought and language break down into white noise on the threshold of life and death.

 

Foucault locates the initial stage of the transgressive movement in Sade’s total affirmation of nature as a state of chaotic flux, a forever dissonant madness which affirms everything (and therefore nothing) at the same time. This is Sade’s “ironic justification” of the “inanity” of Rousseau’s philosophy, with its “verbiage about man and nature” (Madness 283). “Within the chateau where Sade’s hero confines himself” writes Foucault,

 

it seems at first glance as if nature can act with utter freedom. There man rediscovers a truth he had forgotten, though it was manifest. What desire can be contrary to nature, since it was given to man by nature itself? . . . The madness of desire, insane murders, the most unreasonable passions--all are wisdom and reason, since they are part of the order of nature. (282)

 

Foucault points out that the Sadean subject’s transgression is not a simple movement of black into white (which would mean its annihilation), but rather a straddling or puncturing of the binary wall. The subject’s outer, societal “self” is momentarily broken down and reintegrated with the Dionysian continuum, finding “itself in what it excludes … perhaps recognizes itself for the first time” (“Preface” 34-6), a move analogous to the nirvanic (re)union of Atman and Brahmanin Eastern mysticism.

 

“Enlightenment,” then, for the Sadean subject, is this realization of a true nature from which it is nevertheless alien. This essence-less-ness, revealed through Dionysian limit-experience as an “affirmation that affirms nothing” (36), leads to a paradox central to the Foucauldian spiral: for a living subject on the material plane of existence, Dionysus always leads back to Apollo. Every “total” affirmation of nature is thus an anti-affirmation which in turns affirms the exteriority of man; consequently, Sadean “bodies of self and other become objects (rather than sensitive beings) on the threshold between life and death” (During 82), as seen in the following passage from Sade’s Justine:

 

'This torture is sweeter than any you may imagine, Therese,' says Roland; 'you will only approach death by way of unspeakably pleasurable sensations; the pressure this noose will bring to bear upon your nervous system will set fire to the organs of voluptuousness; the effect is certain; were all the people who are condemned to this torture to know in what an intoxication of joy it makes one die, less terrified by this retribution for their crimes, they would commit them more often. . . . . (443)

 

This second phase of Sadean transgression thus establishes the subject’s (re)embrace of the Apollonian, this time with the self-conscious realization that the structural “rules” binding it are, at base, empty: the subject realizes its status as an object. Henceforth, “the relation established by Rousseau is precisely reversed; sovereignty no longer transposes the natural existence; the latter is only an object for the sovereign, which permits him to measure his total liberty,” his distance from the void (Madness 283). Having expelled the binary virus, bodies, be they human or textual, take on the appearance of rhetorical tropes, the articulable creating meaning through freeplay on the surface of the visible. Metaphysics becomes phantasmaphysics:

 

The event . . . is always an effect produced entirely by bodies colliding, mingling, or separating. . . . they create events on their surfaces, events that are without thickness, mixture, or passion. . . . We should not restrict meaning to the cognitive core that lies at the heart of a knowable object . . . we should allow it to reestablish its flux at the limit of words and things, as what is said of a thing . . . as something that happens. ("Theatrum" 172-4)

 

Paglia calls Sade “the most unread major writer in Western literature,” and analyses his work from a vantage point which sheds light on Foucault’s later move towards dandyism. Sade liberates our true nature from the shackles of a Rousseau-inspired liberal humanism which “still permeates our culture from sex counseling to cereal commercials” (Sexual 2). Especially resonant for Paglia in Sade’s Juliette is the protagonist’s remark that “man is in no wise Nature’s dependent,” but “her froth, her precipitated residue” (237). “Sadean nature, the dark hero of Sexual Personae,” says Paglia, “is the Dionysian or, the cthnonian . . . raw, brute earth-power” (“Cancelled” 105). In nature’s realm, humanity enjoys no favoured status, indeed is no more or less important than a plant.

 

Acts are thus without any essential meaning or value–within nature’s operations, “marital sex is no different from rape” (Sexual 237). The result of this realization, Paglia explains, is that Sade, as a male steeped in Enlightenment reason, swerves away from this unpalatable truth of ‘mother’ nature, seen in the intricate sexual configurations of his libertines, with their emphasis on sodomy as a “rational protest against . . . procreative nature” (246). Foucault’s subtle remark regarding the “great, sparkling, mobile, and infinitely extendible configurations” in Sade (“Language” 61) finds its humourous echo in the very unsubtle Paglia: Sade’s libertines, she says

 

swarm together in mutually exploitative units, then break apart into hostile atomies. Multiplication, addition, division: Sade perverts the Enlightenment's Apollonian mathematic. A schoolmaster's voice: if six valets discharge eight times each, how many valets does it take to . . .? (Sexual241)

 

For Paglia, then, Sade’s perversion of the Apollonian structures–the organizing of “Dionysian experience into Apollonian patterns”–is of critical importance in the evolution of the fin de siecle decadence of the 1890’s which she champions (241). Sade’s characters, after being “plunged into Dionysian sewage” at the point of limit-experience, re-emerge as orgiastic “meat puppets” ² in which “no mysteries or ambiguities” reside, these having been “emptied into the cold light of consciousness” (237). If sexual activity mirrors the chaos of true nature, Sade’s libertines proceed to render the act distinctly un-natural, each Dionysian transgression generating more Apollonian verbalizing (the de-structuralist spiral): “Learned disquisitions go on amid orgies” says Paglia, “as in Philosophy in the Bedroom, with its rapid seesaw between theory and praxis. . . . words generally sail on through ejaculation (239). Sadean sex and identity are not finally realized in the expression of the libertines’ internal, Dionysian “natural” urges, but in the Apollonian artifice of their own self-theatre or sexual personae, the “‘tableaux’ and ‘dramatic spectacles’ of interlaced bodies” of which both sadomasochism and aestheticism become a logical extension (242-3, 246-7). And it is Michel Foucault, writer of fictive histories, proponent of the experience-book, who takes enacts this Sadean imperative, turning theory into praxis and finally losing his life in the battle against nature.

 

Decadence As Enlightenment: The Shiny, Empty Subject

 

What is enlightenment? Aldous Huxley: “To be enlightened is to be aware, at all times, of total reality in its immanent otherness . . . and yet be in a condition to survive as an animal . . . to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning” (63). One foot in; one foot out, embodying a state of constant self creation/critique–what the Buddha called paranirvana–is the essence of de-structuralism. To know true nature and be able to live with this knowledge. Foucault, like the Buddha, finally determines that such a state cannot be reached through formulaic means; each person has to find his or her path to “enlightenment” (Miller 283). This does not mean, however, that he is against offering some general ideas re: ways to get there.

 

In the latter stages of his career, Foucault becomes increasingly concerned with the second, reconstructive movement of transgression, moving beyond the final Nietzschean embrace of the Dionysian and its states of madness and dissolution, back toward a place where a transfigured form of living is possible. In “What Is An Author?,” published in 1969 ³, Foucault concurs with the poststructuralist, Barthesian notion that heterotopic fiction, which dissociates and deconstructs the subject-self, has occasioned the death of the author. However, he points out, as with all acts of Dionysian transgression, the Apollonian ordering process quickly seals the gap left by the author’s disappearance: the empirical author may have died, but other control mechanisms fill the void. The author’s name, for instance, functions not like a proper name, but a “name-brand,” indicating not only ownership of the “branded” material, but a certain kind of discourse or product tied to it. And literary critics, aping the methods of Christian exegesis, also act as agents of control by subsuming contradictions, expelling “alien” texts, and generally ordering the disorderly body of the author’s works (105-13).

 

In the 1979 revised text ⁴, Foucault adds some subtle closing remarks which hint at his blossoming interest in dandyism. “I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author” he says. Such a notion is now seen as naive, however, as it discounts the second phase of the transgressive spiral: a pure state of unfettered Dionysiac bliss for textual and/or human bodies is now deemed “pure romanticism” (119) ⁵. The key, instead, is a transformation of the author-function:

 

I think that, as our society changes . . . the author-function will disappear, and . . . that fiction . . . will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint--one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced (my emphasis 119).

 

This last statement is typical of the cagey Foucault, an easily glossed-over hint at his developing interest in an Apollonian praxis. What could he mean by this “experience” of the author-function?

 

If we follow the thought-line of Camille Paglia, the answer gradually comes into focus. The subtitle of Sexual Personae is Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, and to be sure, decadence for her represents the apex of modernity, the culmination of the Apollonian impulse underlying Western culture. For Paglia, decadent art, the logical extension of the total immersion in and subsequent swerve away from nature seen in Sade (ignored by early Romantics such as Wordsworth, with his benign Rousseauism), is embodied in the person of the dandy, who seeks to encompass both movements of the spiral by turning life into art, thereby de-forming and arresting its insidious, deleterious power:

 

Romantic imagination broke through all limits. Decadence, burdened by freedom, invents harsh new limits, psychosexual and artistic. . . . Its nature theory follows Sade and Coleridge, who see nature's cruelty and excess. Art supplants nature. The objet d'art becomes the center of fetishistic connoisseurship. Person is transformed into beautiful thing, beyond the law. Decadence takes western sexual personae to their ultimate point of hardness and artificiality. It is. . . . an Apollonian raid on the Dionysian, the aggressive eye pinning and freezing nature's roiling objects. (389)

 

Mark Edmundson points out that, for Paglia, the decadent sensibility is important because of its recognition that “giving up to nature means unconditionally surrendering to the erotic and destructive drives”–ritual and artifice frustrate nature’s grinding powers of decomposition (310). Paglia rightly locates French culture as the spawning ground for literary decadence, beginning with Balzac’s Sarrasine and then flowering in the works of Baudelaire and Huysmans, whose Against Nature is a virtual guide to decadent/aesthetic practice, and finally spreading to Britain in the person and writings of Oscar Wilde.

 

Logically enough, considering how closely his work follows the Paglian genealogy toward decadence, Foucault finally makes a great effort to place himself within such a lineage, embracing the theories of Baudelaire via Greek ethics in the effort to seize control of the author-function and create a “beautiful life.” In 1983, for example, Foucault explains to Paul Rabinow, editor of The Foucault Reader, his interest in a Greek-influenced personal ethics “beyond the law,” marked by the Apollonian manipulation of the raw Dionysian matter of the self, divorced from the coercions of any external power. “The idea of the bios as a material for an aesthetic piece of art . . . fascinates me” he says. “The idea also that ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with . . . an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure” (“Ethics” 348). The rules of the game called Art–or artifice–Foucault goes on to explain, must be rescued from the hands of the “experts” he vilifies in Discipline and Punish: “Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” he asks (350).

 

It should come as no surprise that Camille Paglia propounds the decadent theories of Charles Baudelaire in Sexual Personae; it may, however, discomfit some Foucauldians to see their man doing exactly the same thing in one of his final published essays, “What is Enlightenment?,” which he requested occupy a central position in The Foucault Reader (Miller 332). For, as Paglia points out, Baudelaire is no humanist, no lover of his fellow man or (especially) woman–he equally rejects reformers and do-gooders” and “condemned Rousseauism in all its forms,” a stance enthusiastically shared by Paglia (Sexual 429). Baudelaire’s program of dandysme, especially as outlined in The Painter of Modern Life, is elitist and hierarchical, stressing the need for the artist/dandy to withdraw from society in order to begin the work of self-authorship. Nature is not even granted the status given it by Sade; for Baudelaire it is a virus which threatens the stability of the self-artifact. The Baudelairean dandy thus fulfills Paglia’s “first principle of decadent art”: the (re)creation of the self as a “manufactured object” (391). This use of civilizing power against civilization is deemed a “daemonization of the Apollonian” (489-511).

 

Baudelaire’s theories find artistic praxis in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel Against Nature, whose protagonist, Des Esseintes, remarks that “Nature . . . has had her day. . . . the old crone has by now exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists, and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible” (37). Des Esseintes’ rejects the “visible” world of nature for an “articulable,” aesthetic environment: he idolizes Sade and Baudelaire. Huysmans’s depiction here of Baudelaire’s journey through the Dionysiac and (re)emergence as an emptied Apollonian exteriority is acute:

 

Literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brains of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and other-worldly aspirations. . . . Baudelaire had gone further; he had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine. . . . There, near the breeding ground of intellectual aberrations and diseases of the mind--the mystical tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the typhoids and yellow fevers of crime--he had found . . . ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions. He had laid bare the morbid psychology of the mind that had reached the October of its sensations . . . he had shown how blight affects the emotions at a time when the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth have drained away, and nothing remains but the barren memory of hardships, tyranny and slights, suffered at the behest of a despotic and freakish fate. (146)

 

Past the petty concerns of a stultifying humanism, Baudelaire had plunged headlong into the Dionysian, exhausting its seemingly limitless excitations, emerging purged of all that might have previously been considered “essential” or “natural”: he “had succeeded in expressing the inexpressible,” knowledge gleaned from the limits of experience (Huysmans 148). And it should be pointed out that this knowledge, leading to the rejection of nature, leads also to the rejection of the female gender. “Woman is the opposite of the dandy. Therefore she must inspire horror” writes Baudelaire. “Woman is natural, that is to say abominable” (qtd in Sexual430). Likewise, Des Esseintes suffers a nightmarish vision of woman as mother-nature trying to devour him (105-6) and indulges in affairs with a “mannish” woman and a schoolboy (110-117).

 

As Foucault points out in “The Right of Death and Power Over Life,” if Sade had shown “man” to nothing more than a meat puppet which had mutated out of the ‘non-place’ of nature, “subject to . . . no other law but its own,” he, as well as Bataille, had failed to complete the spiral back into the Apollonian, a movement crucial for the critique of our present episteme. They, as well as Nietzsche, with his cry “I, the last disciple of Dionysus” at the conclusion of Twilight Of The Idols (110), remain semi-immersed in deadly Dionysian nature, the “society of blood” characteristic of the pre-Enlightenment age (148-50). As a result, though “subversive,” they provide no definitive answers for the problem of an ultra-Apollonian, post-Enlightenment power which seeks to produce subjects so to “normalize” and control them: “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than . . . destroying them” (136). In “What Is Enlightenment?” (in part a strong reading of Kant’s essay of the same name), Foucault credits Baudelaire and his disciples for bringing the line of thinking begun by Sade to fruition, addressing this contemporary problematic by using “man” as the raw material for an artistic elaboration, for the production of personae, remaking the meat puppet as manufactured object. Typically, Foucault skirts the nature-female issue even as he embraces it, though he does briefly cite Baudelaire’s abhorrence of “vulgar, earthy, vile nature” as a touchstone ⁶ (41).

 

For Foucault, Baudelaire’s modern ethos, or “limit-attitude,” encompasses both movements of the transgressive spiral, “beyond the inside-outside alternative” (“Enlightenment” 45). As we saw in Huxley, enlightenment entails a constant awareness of the Dionysian whilst mastering the Apollonian. Just as the dissociated flux of the visible is continually transfigured, framed, and articulated by the decadent artist (as in the experience-book), the body’s ‘perpetual disintegration’ is transfigured through this same ritual application of Apollonian lines, an “ascetic elaboration of the self” which again connects the Foucauldian quest to the operations of mysticism (42). Deleuze identifies this action as a “folding” of outside power relations “to create a doubling, allow a relation to oneself to emerge, and constitute an inside which is hollowed out and develops its unique dimension” (100). This seizure of power “is what the Greeks did: they folded force [and] made it relate back to itself. Far from ignoring interiority, individuality, or subjectivity they invented the subject [and] discovered the ‘aesthetic existence’.” Deleuze cannot overstress the importance of this “fundamental idea” underlying Foucault’s work, that of a “dimension of subjectivity derived from power and knowledge without being dependent on them” (101).

 

This “seizing of bio-power” over one’s self, then, is the “experience of the author-function” Foucault hints at in the revised “What Is An Author?,” and represents his departure from the thought of his oft-quoted mentors, Sade, Nietzsche, and Bataille. It also goes very much against the grain of the thinking which characterizes present-day North American society: the cult of confession and the clamouring of “victims” of various kinds for equality on Donahue and Oprah (which Foucault sneeringly alludes to as “the Californian cult of the self”) are “diametrically opposed” to dandyism, which stresses creation, not confession (“Ethics” 362). Foucauldian enlightenment thus stands “in a state of tension” with humanism” (“Enlightenment” 44). The Apollonian dandy actually seeks to marginalize him or her self, and rejects any attempts to uncover the soul, which is already known to contain the void. “Modern man,” says Foucault, “is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself”. And, he adds ominously, this endeavour has no “place in society itself, or in the body politic,” but can only be “produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire calls art” (42).

 

For both Paglia and Foucault, decadence/dandyism constitutes an ironic reversal: it deploys the ultra-Apollonianism of the modern epoch against itself, substituting art-worlds for “real” worlds. The ordering process that subjects bodies is instead used to liberate them through self-creation and containment. Bodies produce not more malleable bodies measured by their use-value in the service of power, but impenetrable, beautifully “useless” art objects–a sterile productivity. Paglia on Sarrasine:

 

Balzac frustrates sex by deforming nature. Sarrasine reviles Zambinella: "Monster! You who can give birth to nothing!". . . . [but] Zambinella is the first decadent art object. The transsexual castrato is an artificial sex, product of biology manipulated for art. Zambinella does give birth--to other art objects. First is Sarrasine's statue of him/her; then a marble copy commissioned by the cardinal. . . . The sterile castrato, propagating itself through other art works, is an example of my technological androgyne, the manufactured object [who] teems with inorganic seed. (Sexual 391)

 

Dandyism And Beyond: The Order Of Death

 

Through the seizure of power on a microcosmic level, dandyism points the way toward new and different modes of being. Here in our own postmodern fin de siecle, in opposition to both humanism and the thriving “Californian Cult of the self,” the decadent impulse has mutated into new and interesting forms. For novelist Kathy Acker (herself a Foucauldian), this has entailed inhabiting the traditionally “male” realms of bodybuilding and tattoo art in the attempt to de-naturalize and “textualize” the body, thereby “seiz(ing) control over the sign-systems through which people ‘read’ her”–the self as counter-discourse. (McCaffery 72). Likewise, the currently flourishing “cyberpunk” movement finds its basis in “the impulse to invent a hyperreality and then live there” (Porush 331). For Foucault, the decadent impulse leads to the “theatre” of gay sadomasochism, which he sees as “a kind of creation, a creative enterprise” in which the body’s biological sexuality can be subverted or “desexualized.” Playing his role against nature to the hilt, Foucault denies that these practices disclose “S/M tendencies deep within the unconscious” but are the “invention” of “new possibilities of pleasure” (Miller 263).

 

It is doubtful that Foucault really believed this. When Deleuze speaks of dandyism as a state where “one becomes, relatively speaking, a master of one’s molecules” (123), he makes an important qualification. As an advocate of the doctrines of Decadence, Foucault must have surely been aware of another theme inextricably tied to it: the inevitable victory of nature. In the work of Baudelaire, of Huysmans, and in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the scenario is the same: “the self as an artificial enclave. . . which nature secretly enters and disorders” (Sexual 421). The fate of the dandy is most brilliantly critiqued in Huysmans’s novel in the grotesque episode where Des Esseintes acquires a large tortoise and attempts to turn into an objet d’art, painting it gold and encrusting it with jewels. To his consternation, the turtle dies, “unable to bear the dazzling luxury imposed upon it” (62). Later, while sampling his many perfumes, Des Esseintes is overcome by nausea: “discrimination collapses back into nondifferentiation” Paglia notes, and “all the aesthete’s exotic fragrances begin to smell disgustingly alike,” this being the scent of death (Sexual 435). Residing astride the line between Apollo and Dionysus, the enclosed or folded subject risks implosion back into the immanent realm. “It all comes down to syphilis in the end” says Des Esseintes (Huysmans 101), who is finally forced to leave his artificial paradise and return to the world to quite literally save his life.

 

It was, of course, not syphilis, but AIDS, the postmodern plague, which facilitated nature’s revenge upon Foucault. And when Paglia, in her anti-poststructuralist mode, derisorily remarks that “Foucault was struck down by the elemental force he repressed and edited out of his system” she is absolutely correct (“Junk” 241). But her criticism of him for this implies that, unlike those Decadents she praises in Sexual Personae, Foucault somehow had no idea what he was doing, or what the stakes were. Paglia is being duplicitous if she seriously intends to make such an argument. Her valorization of the gay male, the Sadean sadomasochist, and all those Decadents whose swerve from procreative, liquid nature results in the “world of glittering art objects” found in Western culture should include the embrace of the life and work of Foucault, who, as the evidence shows, knew exactly what he was doing. As Deleuze says, “few men more than Foucault died in a way commensurate with their conception of death” (95). In her zeal to tar all post-structuralists with the same brush, Paglia, so commendable in many other ways and the recipient of a great deal of unfair criticism herself, does a great disservice to Foucault.

 

Notes

 

1. See “Bringing Out Michel Foucault” by David Halperin in Salmagundi 97, Winter 1993.

 

2. The term “meat puppets” is cyberpunk jargon, and is borrowed here from Larry McCaffery’s interview with Kathy Acker, where McCaffery comments that Sade is “using the tools of rationality to reveal what we really are–meat puppets governed by the reality of bodily functions” (76).

 

3. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 113-138.

 

4. In The Foucault Reader, 101-120, and in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, 141-160. Josue V. Harari sees this second version of the essay as marking a shift in emphasis “crucial to an understanding of Foucault’s work” (43); James Miller notes that Foucault’s increasing emphasis on Apollonian power/order occasioned a split with the more Dionysian-oriented Deleuze (287-298).

 

5. Paglia’s contention that Foucault’s obsession with power was occasioned by the failure of May, 1968, student and worker revolt in Paris is partially correct (“Junk” 216), but as seen in earlier essays such as “Preface To Transgression” Foucault had always been aware of the inevitable nature of the Apollonian: the nature of the transgressive spiral is such that “no simple infraction” can exhaust it; incursions into the Dionysian are always quickly bound in again by order (35).

 

6. In his otherwise unremarkable new biography of Foucault, David Macey makes two observations crucial for this paper: (1) Foucault, Macey explains, was known for “vehement declarations of his loathing of ‘nature’,” going so far as to turn his back on sunsets to make his point! (60); (2) Foucault also is characterized by some (though not all) of his friends as a misogynist, a side he apparently showed rather selectively (xiv, 55, 455). Both of these points make sense when Foucault is placed in the line of the Baudelairean dandy so admired by Paglia.

 

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