According to Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, “If a man inserted his finger, hand, or foot into his wife’s vagina, he was to undergo a penance of three weeks of fasting. A similar penance was mandated if he used a piece of clothing.” Foucault’s corpse so just popped a boner.
Note for the future:
So here’s the deal. I got in a lot of women’s studies classes on the one hand, and in a sort of skepticalish sense in a class on Foucault on the other, that he’s (maybe?) got this picture of reality he’s trying to get across in, say, The Order of Things that all of reality is somehow socially constructed, that we somehow collectively construct the stuff we see and study. I’m not sure I buy that, even if that’s the sort of thing that he was trying to do.
But I think it might not be. Maybe Foucault wasn’t so much into telling the truth about the world as he was into showing that a certain way of looking at the world just can’t possibly be true. Here’s my reconstruction:
Modern era: “Man constructs all of his experience WITH HIS MIND! Maybe there’s even Platonic forms!”
Foucault: “Do you even know where you came from? Because here’s the thing: Before you, people thought very differently about things. Isn’t that weird? And after you, they’ll probably think differently about things.”
Modern era: “WTF SRSLY?!”
Foucault: “No, really. And here’s the thing: This whole ‘man constructs all of his experience WITH HIS MIND’ whatnot isn’t only kind of embarrassing. Its also problematic.”
Modern era: “But it sounds so COOL! Also, PLATONIC FORMS!”
Foucault: “No it does sound cool, but if man constructs all of his experience with his mind, and part of man’s experience is man, then doesn’t man construct man WITH HIS MIND?“
Modern era: “OMGWTF BWAAAAAAA!”
Foucault: “Yeah, seriously.”
Did you catch the magic move there? The whole episteme talk that makes it so there can be a way of thinking before the modern era, and a way of thinking after the modern era, is kind of a version of “MAN CONSTRUCTS ALL OF HIS EXPERIENCE WITH HIS MIND!!!” Its using the rules of the Modern era that Foucault is able to pull together his claim that the Modern way of thinking self-destructs, and is therefore, I think he hopes, able to inaugurate a new way of thinking. What he doesn’t seem to be interested in doing there, though, is telling the truth, except insofar as “OMG contradiction!” is a truth. That is, you don’t play using a set of rules you think are flawed if what you want is to get at REAL REALITY. You only play with a set of rules that you think are flawed if you want to make sure the people who like those rules aren’t going to cry foul.
In the preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault has some interesting things to say about lists:
[I]t is not simply the oddity of unusual juxtapositions that we are faced with here. We are all familiar with the disconcerting effect of the proximity of extremes, or, quite simply, with the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other; the mere act of enumeration that heaps them all together has a power of enchantment all its own: ‘I am no longer hungry,’ Eusthenes said. ‘until the morrow, safe from my saliva all the following shall be: Aspics, Acalephs, Acanthocephalates, Amoebocytes, Ammonites, Axolotls, Amblystomas, Aphilisions, Anacondas, Ascarids, Amphisbaenas, Angleworms, Amphipods, Anaerobes, Annelids, Anthozoans….’ But all these worms and snakes, all these creatures redolent of decay and slime are slithering, like the syllables which designate them, in Eusthenes’ saliva: that is where they all have their common locus, like the umbrella and the sewing machine on the operating table; startling though their propinquity may be, it is nevertheless warranted by that and, by that in, by that on whose solidity provides proof of the possibility of juxtaposition. It was certainly improbably that arachnids, ammonites, and annelids should one day mingle on Eusthenes’ tongue, but, after all, that welcoming and voracious mouth certainly provided them with a feasible lodging, a roof under which to coexist.
And that is one of the powers of lists: They provide that common locus and do the work of making the dissimilar similar; they glue things together into enormously complex structures in which we find meaning and utility. In fact, suppose I were to make a list of things that were dissimilar: cats, laundry baskets, water, sunlight. These dissimilar things, in the context of my list become similar through their very dissimilarity. We can begin to see in them the similarities we started by denying. We can even create a narrative through which these objects become similar above and beyond their dissimilarity, pushed along by the montage of things merely in proximity.
Now look back on Aldiss’ lists: The dissimilar things on the shelves become similar through their placement on those shelves and on the page. The things themselves and their proximity tell a story above and beyond what Aldiss is willing to come out and say. And their contrasts further that story: Why would S have a copy of ‘Pregnancy–Conception To Childbirth’ and an issue of ‘Boy’s Own Paper’? Why an oily rag and a chair leg? Aldiss doesn’t give any clues, beyond what the other characters in the book do with this information. These characters are in the same position as the reader – their task, and the reader’s, is to decipher the meanings of these lists.
