labrys, études féministes/
estudos feministas
janvier / juin 2015 -janeiro/juin 2015
Stylistics of existence and heterotopias of the body in Foucault and in the contemporary feminisms: beyond the legal subject
Priscila Piazentini Vieira
Abstract
This communication assesses the contributions that both Foucault and the feminisms have given to the subject of the transformation of the modes of existence in the present time. Both face the production of new forms of subjectivity as one of the main tactics of political struggle. To focus on the questioning of the ethical subject, as reflects Foucault, brings a possibility of escape from the ambiguities and the dangers that the fight for the figure of women as legal subjects has meant in the last decades. If this claim, on one hand produced conquests and advances in the institutional democratic area, there is, on the other, no guarantee that free and autonomous modes of life are created. Foucault and the feminists have noticed these impasses, brought by liberalism and by the policies of representation, showing how the practices of freedom, the care of the self and the world are necessary for the creation of the new subjectivities. Foucault’s wager in the domain of ethics is also linked to the problem of the historization of the body and the relationships of power that permeate it in modern culture. He warned us, moreover, about the biopolitical government of the bodies of populations. These reflections converge with the propositions and political objectives of the contemporary feminisms, that have also in their struggles against the naturalization and violence suffered in the bodies of women one of their central issues. At the same time, both point to the political force that bodies have in the creation of other relationships with the self and with others. The heterotopias of the body appear thus as one of the possibilities of the stylization of existence.
Key-words:Foucault,feminisms, political force, bodies
Nietzsche describes, in The Gay Science (Nietzsche, 1974), the free spirit of the philosopher as that which bids farewell to all belief, to all wish for certainty, “being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses” (Nietzsche, 1974: 290). Thence his praise of the Greeks, of the way they lived and knew, for they stayed on the surface, at the fold, on the skin, and worshipped appearance, believed in forms, in tones, in words, differently from scientific interpretation, that would be deprived of sense in its conception She is a post-doctoral academic in Cultural History at Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas at Unicamp, and a researcher of Fapesp since july 2014.of a completely mechanic world. He says:
"Those Greeks were superficial - out of profundity! (…) Are we not, precisely in this respect - Greeks? Adorers of forms, of tones, of words? And therefore - artists? "(Nietzsche, 1974: 38).Thus it is that for Nietzsche not science will be the best approach to knowledge, as it impoverishes life, but art. The strength of knowledge does not then reside in its degree of truth, but in its character of incorporation, of condition for life. Nietzsche emphasizes the figure of the dancer, beyond that of the artist, to indicate the only ideal philosophers should have, far indeed from the worship of truth – dance:
"How much a spirit needs for its nourishment, for this there is no formula; but if its taste is for independence, for the quick coming and going, for the trek, for roaming, perhaps for adventures for which only the swiftest are a match, it is better for such a spirit to live in freedom with little to eat than unfree and stuffed. It is not fat but the greatest possible suppleness and strength that a good dancer desires from his nourishment – and I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety, his “service of God”" (Nietzsche, 1974: 345-346).
Nietzsche criticizes our way of producing knowledge, asserting that modern science excludes art from its way of thinking, thus attaching itself to the figure of a universal and neutral subject, and to the wish for truth. His preference for the relationship that the artist and the dancer have with themselves and the world links him to Michel Foucault and his praise of the arts of existence and the courage for the truth of the Greeks, as well as for their interest in the body of the dancer, when he speaks of the “utopias sealed in the body” (Foucault, 2006: 232), descend beneath the clothes:
And perhaps, then, one should descend beneath the clothes – one should perhaps reach the flesh itself, and then one would see in that in some cases even the body itself turns its on utopian power against itself, and brings in all the space of the religious and the sacred, allowing all the space of religious and the sacred, all the space of the other world, all the space of the counter world, to enter into the space that is reserved for it. So the body, then, in its materiality, in its flesh, would be like the product of its own phantasms. After all, isn’t the body of the dancer, precisely a dilated along and entire space that is both exterior and interior to it? (Foucault, 2006: 232).
These two subjects so present in the thought of Foucault, those of the ethics and stylistics of existence and of the heterotopic spaces and heterotopias of the body, permeate also the contemporary feminisms. On the first subject, that of the stylistics of existence, Margareth Rago, Margaret McLaren, Tania Swain and many others point to the importance of ethics being thought as a political practice fundamental to feminism. In the same sense the editors Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges complement, in Feminism and the final Foucault (Taylor; Vintges, 2004):
"When politics is conceived in terms of ethos, political movements like feminism are seen as shared yet open practices or identities that critique reality and work on its limits without the aid of what Foucault himself refers to as “blueprints” '(Taylor; Vintges, 2004: 2).
Margaret McLaren, in Feminism, Foucault and embodied subjectivity (McLaren, 2002), emphasizes that the feminists, like Foucault himself, began to explicitly explore the connection between ethics and politics, until then implicit in many feminist theorizations. She demonstrates that while ethics and politics were viewed separately, politics was associated to the government, to the state, to power and public policies. Ethics on the other hand was linked to individual actions and relevant only to private life. The feminists offered, however, a critique of the liberal state and its practices, such as the marginalization of women and of racial minorities, such as the separation between the public and the private, excluding the family and domestic life to adhere to the principles of justice, and the attention to equality to the loss of the recognition of difference.
"The feminists also offered alternative viewpoints to the prevalent morals and created ethical practices very different from it, mainly around themes as marriage and maternity, fighting the normative roles of gender and drastically transforming them. On the axis of ethics and of the practices of the self, McLaren holds that these discussions promote a transformation that is at once individual and collective, as it is not simply a individual personal goal, but deals with a social and political structural change "(McLaren, 2002: 16).
It is thus that McLaren argues that many feminists believe that Foucault’s work on ethics can be politically useful to feminism. The authors Taylor and Vintges also defend (Taylor; Vintges, 2004: 4) that the most important characteristics of the foucaultian ethos , that is, engaging the present, taking responsibility for oneself and the world, furthering and expanding the work of freedom are compatible with the propositions and objectives of contemporary feminism, stressing that:
"Feminist politics and theory are no longer oriented merely toward internal struggles to establish their identities but are actively concerned with and directed toward issues and struggles relevant of our time, including war, justice, emancipation, and polarization between cultures (…) Feminism is strengthened not by the assertion of a single, homogeneous identity but rather through a dedicated, contextual, and critical engagement with itself and the world" (McLaren, 2002: 16).
These reflections on the establishment of identities take us to the critique that Judith Butler (Butler, 1990) made in 1990’s to what had been done by a large part of feminist theory: supposed that there is a definite identity, encompassed by the category of women, in whose name political representation is wanted. As Butler holds, this relation between feminist theory and politics began to be questioned inside the feminist discourse itself, pointing to the limits of representational politics.
The very subject of women themselves is no longer understood in stable or permanent terms and many essays question the viability of the “subject” as a final candidate to liberation or representation. Butler, based on Foucault, warns that the juridical systems of power themselves produce the subjects that they come to represent, coming to the conclusion that the very political system that should facilitate the emancipation of women ends up harming it. So it is that the juridical power “produces” also that which it claims to merely represent, and this production is worked through practices of exclusion, domination and relations of power that are constitutive of the juridical system. Butler indicates the dangers of the figure of the legal subject and its presuppositions connected to the founding fable of the natural state, produced by liberalism:
"The prevailing assumption of the ontological integrity of the subject before the law might be understood as the contemporary trace of the state of nature hypothesis, that foundationalist fable constitutive of the juridical structures of classical liberalism. The performative invocation of a nonhistorical “before”, becomes the foundational premise that guarantees a presocial ontology of persons who freely consenting to be governed and, thereby, constitute the legitimacy of the social contract" (Butler, 1990: 3).
And so it is that Butler takes as a fundamental task the making of a feminist genealogy of the category of women, determining the political operations that produce and conceal what she qualifies as the “juridical subject of feminism”. She asks a fundamental question: “Do the exclusionary practices that ground feminist theory in a notion of ‘women’ as a subject paradoxically undercut feminist goals to extend it claims to ‘representation’?” (Butler, 1990: 5). She goes further when she asks herself: “Is the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?” (Butler, 1990: 5).
Foucault has shown, besides, in his researches of the 70’s, how this figure of the legal subject was colonized by disciplines, by biopolitics and by the dispositives of security. In his History of Sexuality. Volume I (Foucault, 1978), when he discusses our understanding of power around the conceptions of the law, Foucault emphasizes that a tradition of the XVII or XIX Centuries has habituated us to place absolute monarchical power on the side of not-law. But that would be to forget the fundamental historical line that western monarchies were built as systems of laws and operated their mechanisms of power in the form of law.
Even with all efforts the representation of power stayed stuck in this system, and two fundamental historical examples are fundamental. In the first place, the critique of the monarchical institution in France in the XVIII Century was not made against the juridical-monarchical system, but against a monarchy that went continuously beyond the law and placed itself above the laws. It did not question the principle that the law must be the very form of power, and that power should always be exercised in the form of law. Secondly, another type of critique of political institutions made its appearance in XIX Century: it showed that not only royal power went beyond the rule of law, but that the legal system itself was no more than a way of exerting violence, of incorporating it to the profit of some, and making work, under the appearance of a general law, the dissymmetry and lack of justice of a domination. But this critique is made still against the backdrop of the postulate that essentially and ideally power should be exercised in accordance with a fundamental right.
Despite the differences in the age and in objectives, the representation of power kept the mark of monarchy. The head of the king has not yet been cut in political analysis and thought. Thence the importance given, in the theory of power, to the problem of right and of violence, to the law and illegality, to will and freedom, and, above all, to the state and sovereignty. To think about power starting from these problems is to understand it from the point of view of a historical form particular to our societies: juridical monarchy.
A particular form, and a transitory one too. For if many of its characteristics remained and remain still, it was little by little permeated by extremely new mechanisms of power, mechanisms probably irreducible to legal representation. The new procedures of power work not through the law, but through normalization, not through punishment but through control, and are exercised in ways and levels beyond the state and its machinery. Our line of escape leads us ever farther of the realm of law promised to near future. And so it is that every time that rights are claimed, we have to pay attention also to these other several devices of power that produced the subjectivity of the modern individual.
One of the most remarkable new things in the study of Foucault on the modern technologies of power was the attention paid to the body as its principal object of control. Based again on Nietzsche, Foucault will show “the body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” (Foucault, 1984: 83). In Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977), he will show the body being scrutinized by the techniques and disciplines of punishment, the opposite of what was defended by the theses of the “humanization” of the condemnations. According to those, the prison would inaugurate an essentially non- corporeal penalty, concerned with punishing the souls of the individuals, making the body disappear from the arena of punishment. Foucault is in drastic disagreement with this position and does not share in the duality that modern thought has created between the body and the soul.
Foucault, at the same time he emphasizes the centrality of the body, does not treat the modern soul as an illusion or an ideological effect. He affirms the existence of a reality “produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished” (Foucault, 1977: 29). Many concepts were created on this reality of the soul, concepts such as subjectivity, the personality, the conscience, etc. From it also were valorized the claims of humanism. But Foucault observes:
"[…] let there be no misunderstanding: it is not the real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of the theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself" (Foucault, 1977: 30).
The soul is then a cog in the domination exerted by power on the body, it being both effect and tool of a political anatomy. McLaren will defend the utility of Foucault for feminism in precisely this direction: “I argue that Foucault’s work provides resources to articulate a notion of subjectivity that is embodied, and constituted historically and through social relations” (McLaren, 2002: 14).
Butler, in the above mentioned text, takes up again this critique of Foucault of the dualist view of philosophy on the body and soul, aiming it mainly against the idea of gender as construction. The idea that gender is constructed suggests, for her, a certain determinism, the bodies being understood as the passive vessels of an inexorable cultural law. We get the impression that gender is as determinate and fixed as in the case of biology being destiny. Culture would, in this case, be destiny and the body but a mere instrument or a means of the cultural significations. Faced with that she asks: how to conceive the body differently? By paying attention to not safeguard some dogmas of humanism as a presupposition of any analysis of gender, Butler criticizes two distinctions:
"[...]the Cartesian, between freedom and the body, and the phallocentric, between body and soul (conscience, mind), warning about the common cultural associations that produce hierarchies and submissions: between mind and masculinity and between body and femininity, coming to the conclusion that: “any uncritical reproduction of the mind/body distinction ought to be rethought for the implicit gender hierarchy” (Butler, 1990: 10).
The woman’s body, besides being produced by this duality, as made explicit by Foucault in his History of Sexuality. Volume I composes the first of the four great strategic sets through which the dispositive of sexuality is developed. The “hysterization of the woman’s body” is characterized by a triple process: the body of woman analyzed as completely saturated of sexuality; how it was integrated, under the effect of a pathology that would be intrinsic to it, in the field of medical practices; and how it was put into communication with the social body, with the space of the family and the lives of children. The other, with its negative image, that of the “nervous woman” is the most visible form of this hysterization (Foucault, 1978: 104).
As already commented, McLaren emphasizes Foucault’s utility for feminism mainly from two concepts: the materiality of the body and the practices of freedom (McLaren, 2002: 166). She interprets him as an activist profoundly mistrustful of the dominant culture, of the traditional manners of thinking and of traditional politics, whence his critique of the figure of the subject of law, which brings him still closer to the contemporary feminisms. In order to attack this production of the woman’s body and its subjectivity through the dispositive of sexuality, and to escape from a reflection centered simply in the fight for rights, Tania Swain (Navarro-Swain, 2002) and Margareth Rago (Rago, 2006) assert the importance of the ethical question and emphasize that women, beyond the liberal conquests, also invent an ethics that is a contestation of the dominant masculine morals and the institutional political picture. In this sense they have created, as Rago reflects, feminist heterotopias:
"The demand of freedom and the possibility of ethically inventing ourselves, building ourselves in a manner different from what we havebeen in the present lead some feminists to ask themselves for their own “heterotopias” (Rago, 2006: 111).
Foucault’s heterotopias, as defended by Acevedo in La cuestion del espacio en la filosofia de Michel Foucault (Acevedo, 2013) should be also understood “heterotopias of the self”, or as a “ethopoetic heterotopia”. In his words: “Ethopoetics in the sense of keeping the ascesis as an exercise of the subjectivation of the truth, and Heterotopic, as the field of possibilities that may be crossed by multiple paths, multiple possibilities, at the same time constrained and modifiable by the limits that the relations of power of the self on the self produce, keep and transgress” (Acevedo, 2013: 198). It is then about, he goes on, “the creation of other subjectivities, I mean, other subjective spaces (heterotopic) in which the new relationships among the subject, the truth and power (ethos) materialize as if in a new game of limits and possibilities” (Acevedo, 2013: 204).
Heterotopias of the self or heterotopias of the body? Why do many, after all, insist so hard in separating the body from the soul? The materiality from the subjectivity? To exclude all heterotopias from the transformations of the subjectivity? Or to erase all utopia from the body? Foucault says:
"[...]…) perhaps the most obstinate, the most powerful of those utopias with which we erase the sad topology of the body has been, since the beginning of the Western history, supplied to us by the great myth of the soul. The soul. It functions in my body in the most marvelous way: it resides there, of course, but it also knows how to escape. It escapes from the body to see things through the windows of my eyes. It escapes to dream when I sleep, to survive when I die. It is beautiful: It is pure, it is white. And if my body – which is moody, or in any case not very clean – should come to soil it, there will always be a virtue, there will always be a power, there will be a thousand sacred gestures that will reestablish my soul in its primary purity. It will last a long time, my soul, more than a “long time”, when my old body comes to rot. Long live my soul!" (Foucault, 2006: 230).
Utopias are never fully successful in erasing the body, for, as we are reminded by Foucault: they “were born from the body itself, and perhaps afterwards they turned against it” (Foucault, 2006: 231). As an end, I come back to dance and to the transfiguration of the body itself. It has, for Foucault, “its own phantasmagoric resources. It, too, possesses some placeless place, and places more profound, more obstinate even than the soul, than the tomb, than the enchantment of magicians” (Foucault, 2006: 230). I remember Pina Bausch and her beautiful and free movements. “Dancing even near abysses”, said Nietzsche. Foucault spurs us to create other spaces of existence, other bodies. It is up to us then to have the courage of dancing, dangerously, with Foucault.
Translated by Ricardo Lopes.
Biography
She is a post-doctoral academic in Cultural History at the Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas at Unicamp, and a researcher of Fapesp since July 2014. Bachelor (2005), Master (2008) and PhD (2013) in History by the IFCH of Unicamp. She was a substitute teacher for the UFU. She is devoted to the study of the conceptions of Michel Foucault, mainly those concerned with genealogical history, the courage of truth, specific intellectual and legal subject. Her monograph on Michel Foucault and Genealogical History in Discipline and Punish (2005) was published and awarded a prize in the Monograph Contest of the IFCH students in Unicamp.
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labrys, études féministes/
estudos feministas
janvier / juin 2015 -janeiro/juin 2015