30 Work as Text: Myths in a Self-contained World: Michael Foucault, J. Hillis Miller

Ms. Shikha Vats

Introduction

Studies in literary criticism witnessed a marked change in the very process of making sense of the world around us, with the advent of the theories of Structuralism and Poststructuralism. The twentieth century saw thinkers like Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida and many others, focussing on the key role played by language in all of our dealings. Irrespective of the sphere of interaction, be it text, culture, or gender, language was identified as the primary site for shaping meanings. However, it must not be deduced that before these theories arrived on the scene, there was no significance accorded to language. Such an assumption would be instrumental in misunderstanding literary criticism as a chain of isolated events. Instead, it was the scope provided by the works of earlier theorists like Ferdinand De Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss, which enabled the later developments. As a result, the works which followed were the ones which took the analysis one step further. This concerned, challenging the traditional theories of language and culture, in order to locate the moments when internal hierarchies are established. Here, the seemingly passive function of language as a mode of communication and medium of literature was questioned. The power which is inherent in such acts of ‘reading’ was called out and highlighted in its use. Therefore, the poststructuralist studies emerged in conjunction with the structuralist criticism insofar as it aimed to scrutinize language from the vantage point of producing not just texts and meanings, but also cultures and myths.

Most of these theories attempt a reformulation of the relationship amongst a given text, its author and its reader. As opposed to the common reading which held the text as a repository of its author’s intentions, or the text as revelatory of its author’s context and motivations, the post-structuralists focus on reading itself as a cultural act. To grasp this change of focus from the author to the reader, and most importantly, to the process of reading, one must go back to understanding the workings of language. Language, in its capacity to produce meanings and consequently the varied perceptions and belief systems, becomes a pivotal point of contact between an individual and the world. Saussure sought to understand this aspect of language through an examination of its building blocks. In his findings, he proposed that language comprises of arbitrary sound units called ‘signifiers’ and concept images called ‘signified’. There is no logical manner in which each word corresponds to some entity in the real world. Rather, ‘in language there are only differences without positive terms’ (Saussure 121). Thus, the entire system of language works on the basis of difference, not reference. In the absence of any relatable, and/or referential function of language, the meaning of any given word is not essential to language. There is no concept or inherent meaning which exists within language.

With such a breakthrough in understanding the linguistic structure, Saussure’s theory allowed for the interventions of a lot of disciplines like psychoanalysis, cultural studies, feminism etc. within the domain of literary studies. The disconnect between the word/sign and its meaning/image was also depicted in the visual tradition by surrealist painters, like René Magritte and Salvador Dali, by inserting captions within the painting or giving a particularly peculiar title to the artwork. The point that was well established through all of these artistic and literary endeavors was concerned with the meaning making force of language. Given the fact that a language always-already pre-exists makes it necessary to note that whenever an author/artist creates a literary/artistic work, it is first subject to that conditionality. Further, the work will inevitably have elements which respond to what has been the existing corpus in that genre, be it as a departure from it or continuity in the same tradition. This phenomenon which Harold Bloom famously termed as ‘the anxiety of influence’ is less to do with the author’s personal state of mind, and more to do with the language’s functioning itself. Such an over-reaching and dispersing effect of language exists precisely because the signs function not only through words, but also through other symbols such as traffic signals, gestures, rituals etc. Within a world of language which encourages such a ‘plurality of the signifier, withholding the gratification … of a final signified’ (Belsey Loc 292), it is not difficult to gauge the implications of language in our culture. Writers like Barthes and Foucault used this as the point of departure for many of their studies which are broadly classified under the field of cultural studies within the poststructuralist thought. This involved an examination of a lot of practices which gradually acquire the status of a ‘naturalized’ and usual tradition, which Barthes calls as ‘myths’. In this theory of naming them as myths, there lies an attempt to unearth the historical origin of such a practice, which is erased by its permeation into the realm of natural. Drawing from the works of the most influential structural anthropologist Levi Strauss, the later thinkers analyzed certain myths for their power to explain the customs of various cultures. Barthes undertakes a scrutiny of the most mundane everyday practices like striptease, wrestling, advertisements of toys, in order to explain these as signs of culturally and historically loaded value systems. Similarly, Foucault’s works, through a rigorous historical analysis, provide a gateway into understanding how various socio-cultural discourses come into being, and what lies hidden about the society in its attempt to normalize and adopt such discourses. Thus, the society/culture must be read as a text whose presently dominant meaning (circulating as myth) has its relation to the historical moment of its use. These arguments are made legible through Foucault’s theories, discussed in the next section.

Michel Foucault: Power and the Discourse of Language

Foucault (1926-84) spent his life studying the themes of madness, punishment, discipline and sexuality as discourses arising out of the power relations constituted by language, knowledge and truth. All his studies negotiate the idea of a ‘subject’ which is constituted in and through the language and cultural context in which one is conditioned. The phrase subject sets itself as distinct from identity, being, or personality of an individual. It contains within it the implications of being subject to certain socio-cultural meanings internalized in a particular language. Thus, the terms like speaking subject, disciplined subject, desiring subject etc. become the common catchphrases in his writings, which are also later adopted by many psychoanalytic theories. He also popularizes the concept of ‘discourse’ as different from the use of topic, or discipline because it entails the notion of a dynamic and multi-faceted, interactive model instead of a sense of fixed rigidity in the idea of topic. All such phrases form crucial part of Foucault’s theorization and take shape organically from his works which are devoted to the idea of problematization. In this framework, it is not the explanations or descriptions which aid the argument, rather it is the intersection of multiple practices from the past and present which contribute to a complex web of the problematic. As a result, Foucault’s works closely combine the elements of Philosophy, History and Anthropology in order to sharpen the critique.

In his work titled The Order of Things, Foucault makes clear his concept of knowledge and its relation to literature. For him, the ground for production of knowledge consists in a clash between conflicting forces- of thought, belief etc. In the Preface to his book, he writes, “this book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought — our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography” (Foucault xvi). Here, the reference to another author Borges is clearly marked out as the point of conflicting paradigm of thought. Thus, the new knowledge which emerges in this destruction of the earlier ‘landmarks’ is charted out in space and time. Through this manner of using spatial tropes, Foucault explains the production of knowledge as a process of ordering and reordering the given meanings and thoughts. His notion of ‘heterotopia’ as this site of alternate space arises out of a destabilization of the familiar grounds of knowledge. If the familiar grounds are destabilized, it will consequently lead to the formation of new ways of knowing, different from the dominant and mainstream modes. It is precisely this new topology of spaces which allows Foucault to disrupt the notion of fixed origins. In a telling comment, he writes, “heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) … dissolve our myths” (Foucault xix). They do so by ‘creating an intensification of knowledge that can help us re-see the foundations of our own knowledge’ (Topinka 70). It is this naturalization of the so-called myths in our present society that Foucault aims to expose. Such an exposure would be helpful in determining the power wielded by a certain set of meanings which enable the mythification in the first place. Foucault encourages a cultivation of a sense of healthy suspicion towards all that seems naturally ordained, all that operates within the realm of myths. It is the indisputable fact of historical contingency which his writings introduce in all the discourses. Since power is plural and operates by its permeation into all possible social relations, one must be aware of its workings. However, in a manner of disclaimer, it must be mentioned that Foucault does not theorize power as necessarily oppressive. Rather it has a creative potential with a capacity of forming an ethics of being. Hence, power in Foucault is not an entity/force to be possessed, rather it is dispersed within any and every relation of social hierarchy. Nevertheless, all power relations are always built with a possibility of resistance within them.

Foucault’s most pressing concern is to question the ‘norm’, be it that of healthy psychology or disciplined citizens or gendered sexuality. He undertakes this enquiry through all his works ranging from Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality respectively. Just as he attempts a dissection of the given ‘norm’ in society and culture, he does the same in literature too. One of his most significant pieces of literary criticism is in the form of a lecture titled “What is an Author?”. Taking his lead from Barthes’ “Death of the Author” which proposed a vanishing act of the author as the ‘authority’ over the text, Foucault also delineates a different definition of an author. By replacing the ‘who’ of a person and introducing ‘what’, he constitutes the author as a “functional principle” within the literary studies. This replacement also serves well in effacing the ‘author’ of all his/her personhood which comes attached with its peculiar notions of intentions, motives etc. and invests it with a certain function it serves. In his own words, the author works as a principle “by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses: (…) the author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (qtd in Foucault, “What is an Author”). This very fear of the proliferation of meanings is that which must be checked by declaring the metaphorical death of the author and birth of the reader. The point is precisely to allow the proliferation and multiplicity of meanings.

The choice of literary works which Foucault seems interested in and cites on several occasions, do well to bolster his theories. These include authors like Borges and Samuel Beckett. It is evident that for Borges as well as Foucault, the notion of simulacra is central to their fiction and literary theory respectively. The concept suggests a multitude of representations, without one or the other being more real, true or authentic in any which way. Similarly, the interpretations of any text must necessarily emerge as simulacra (a concept popularized by Borges and critic Baudrillard) with limitless readings, commentaries and meanings linked to it. One of the short story collection by Borges titled Labyrinths provides numerous tales, all with a blurring line between illusions and real, representations and original, imaginary and experiential, artifice and natural, fictive and authentic. This is what Foucault aspires for literary criticism as well, that which is not reducible to straight-jacketed modes of critique. Instead, a book which is in his words, “a minuscule event” must be understood as a discourse which implies “at the same time battle and weapon, strategy and blow… irregular encounter and repeatable scene” (O’Leary 8). It is only through such an encounter between a text and its readers that literature must be experienced.

This intricate relationship between subjectivity and experience, for Foucault, is what is contained in the literary world. In an interview, Foucault mentions, “for me the break was first Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance” [O’Leary 5]. The break mentioned here suggests a sense of change/transformation in one’s perception. The literary introduces such a possibility not merely through its distance from the real world; rather it is the language itself, as Foucault says, which brings us into contact with “that which does not exist, in so far as it is” (O’Leary 17). This poststructural notion of language lies at the core of Foucault’s theories about literature, culture and our position in the world. Each reading opens up the possibilities for future re-readings, while revealing and obscuring certain meanings at the same time. As a result, all the commitment to a singular and univocal manner of interpreting/critiquing texts must be given up in favor of the multiple unravelling of ideas. It is a reading which demands an effacement and erasure of the fixity of notions like truth and order. Such an argument brings one closer to the deconstructionist model of criticism, discussed in greater detail in the next section.

J. Hillis Miller and the Ethics of Reading 

Miller’s work largely focusses on the act of reading a literary work and the position of the reader/recipient. Belonging to the Geneva school of literary criticism, and later the Yale school of deconstructionists, Miller along with thinkers like Harold Bloom and Paul De Mann figured within prominent ones in the circle of American literary critics. In a manner of engaging with each other’s works, these critics formed the tenets of Deconstruction, majorly as a response to and dialogue with the French critic Jacques Derrida. The practice of deconstruction, among other things, also aims to bust the myth of a conventional, fixed and univocal mode of reading and interpreting a text. This is done through two major arguments. Firstly, since every language is fundamentally metaphorical and figurative, it is impossible to propose that there exists only one meaning to what is written in a text. Secondly, one would do well to avert the dangers of falling into the trap of ‘intentional fallacy’, a term popularized by Wimsatt and Beardsley implying the belief in authorial intentions. The second takes its effect from the first proposition, because once a text has been created/produced, it exists as a free-floating entity, susceptible to meanings and implications of its changing context. As a result, the absence of one unanimous meaning, also opens up the sphere of so-called objective truth, for further possible scrutiny.

To lay the groundwork for understanding the deconstructionist model, one must first grasp its take on the concepts like subject, object and truth. Arising out of the post-structuralist model, the technique of deconstruction takes the concepts one step further, in an attempt to undo all manner of declarative definitions. As explained so far, subject exists as a product of language and culture. This already goes against the traditional Cartesian model (after the French philosopher René Descartes, 1596-1650) where consciousness/subjectivity exists irrespective of the language and culture. In its defining stance of ‘I think, therefore I am’, there is a primacy given to the thinking consciousness which is fundamental in shaping the very being. However, in the poststructuralist view, that notion of independent and pristine subjectivity has already been undone. Nothing exists outside of language and culture. Thus, a subjective opinion which generally stands for a personalized viewpoint, arising from one’s own consciousness, is the one which is always-already a result of the conditioning of one’s culture. In other words, a subject is always produced outside of oneself. It can never be the site for the origins of any ideas whatsoever. However, this does not imply that each and every idea exists only outside of oneself. Rather, the purely objective does not exist either; this is because such a knowledge is only what becomes the property of a subject. As Catherine Belsey sums it up, “what is outside the subject constitutes subjectivity; the subject invades the objectivity of what it knows” (Loc 949-950). Therefore, there is a complete rupture of binaries such as purely subjective and objective. Each permeates the other and constitutes all that is the effect of the other. Deconstruction works in this manner of questioning the neat divisions as what some critics call, a rhetorical discipline.

Miller’s essay titled ‘The Critic as Host’ is a pertinent work in the field of deconstructionist studies. It was written as a response to M. H. Abrams’ piece ‘The Deconstructive Angel’ which denounced the technique of deconstructionist criticism as a fatal parasite which feeds on the so-called actual, univocal reading of a text. The defense of deconstruction as a valid mode of criticism which Miller writes takes on the very form of that mode. So his essay defending deconstruction itself reads as a deconstructive critique of Abrams’ claim. He begins by questioning who and what decides which one is the host reading and which one is the parasite. By bringing in a chain of citations, Miller complicates the simplistic equation of readings having primary and secondary importance. He debunks Abrams’ view which sets out the so-called obvious and ‘univocal’ reading as identical to the poem/text itself which it is interpreting. To say that deconstructionist reading is a parasite on the univocal reading is made possible by implying that univocal reading and the text itself exist on the same footing. So, to start with, Miller segregates both the kinds of readings, be it univocal or equivocal (that is, deconstructionist) from the text. Both the readings exist on one plane which is separate from the text. One must, therefore, begin by questioning the obviousness of the ‘obvious’ reading.

Furthermore, Miller attempts a re-reading of the word parasite which has come to assume the implications of an insidious entity which feeds off its host, without providing any kind of recompense. However, in tracing its etymology, one finds a quite different meaning in its Greek root parasitos, meaning “beside the grain”, para (beside in this case), plus sitos, grain, food. Miller writes, “a parasite was originally something positive, a fellow guest, someone sharing the food with you, there with you beside the grain” (Bloom et al. 220). Therefore, here the implications of host and parasite (guest) are as two parties partaking the food. The plot thickens when the host who is also eating in the first instance, becomes the food itself and is therefore, eaten. As a result, Miller diagnoses the complication when the ‘univocal’ reading assumes the place of the food/text being eaten. Since parasite is someone which cannot exist independent of the host, and necessarily needs the other for its survival, it is the host which gives meaning to its existence, in its own language. Similarly, the metaphysical/univocal reading has so far put on the mantle of naming the ‘parasite’ as such and not anything else. In a telling reversal, Miller suggests that it is also possible that the ‘univocal’ reading is the one which is “the parasitical virus which has for millennia been passed from generation to generation in Western culture in its languages and in the privileged texts of those languages” [Bloom et al. 222]. This reversal of the host and parasite is one of the aspects of what is called deconstruction. However, as clarified earlier, the necessary erasure of binaries and definitions is fundamental to any successful understanding of deconstructionist reading.

Conclusion

To sum up, what both these sections provide as a cumulative understanding of twentieth century literary criticism, is a glimpse into the world of poststructuralism. On the one hand, Foucault’s work exemplifies in depth and great detail, what are the implications of a language within culture which is permeated with power. On the other hand, Miller takes on what it requires to not give up on the multiplicity and plurality which language props itself up for, against the tide of the well-accepted ‘actual’, and ‘obvious’. For both the thinkers, and for many other belonging to the same school of thought, reading implies a cultural act which must be recognized and acknowledged as such. The arresting of meaning through ages of normalization is what one must strive against. Foucault’s notion of bio-power which is realized when power functions as ‘governmentality’, and Miller’s reinterpretation of host-parasite relationship, both have direct implications on the very body of the subject. The power and meanings which lay claims on the bodies of its subject, are the ones which then delineate a way of living for a being. It is the calling out of such practices by the recognition of their insidious modes of working, that poststructuralist deconstruction adheres to. Most of these thinkers, primarily Foucault and Derrida, devote the later part of their scholarship to the question of forming an ethics of existence. There is a sense of responsibility which is required in order for one to lead a life. While there is tremendous suspicion of any such unifying concept, there is certainly a sense of affirmation in the very possibility of an ‘alternative’.

The post-structuralist school of thought has often been criticized for being seemingly self-defeating and ever-elusive about the stance it wishes to adopt. However, such a critique would be a result of a half-baked understanding of the technique. It is precisely the school of thought which works towards liberating all criticism from becoming fixed in a set mould. Poststructuralism and Deconstruction work against the tendency of paralyzing analysis, in this or that meaning. It resists all totalizing forces of criticism as well as dominating effects of such totalitarian readings. The dynamism afforded by this school of thought is what provides possibilities of existence in a world full of myths and devoid of all foundational truths.

Reference

• Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
• Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York, Continuum, 1995.
• Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York, Routledge Classics, 2002.
• Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Societé Francais de Philosophie, 22 Feb. 1969, www.generation-online.org/p/fp_foucault12.htm.
• O’Leary, Timothy. “Foucault, Experience, Literature.” Foucault Studies, vol. 5, Jan. 2008, pp. 5–25.
• Saussure, Ferdinand De. Course in General Linguistics. New York, Philosophical Library, 2012.
• Topinka, Robert J. “Foucault, Borges, Heterotopia: Producing Knowledge in Other Spaces.” Foucault Studies, vol. 9, Sept. 2010, pp. 54–70.